‘Each of her works is both testimony and proof that she survived and has been able to give form to trauma’

At first, all you see is her smile. A mischievous, almost childlike grin that fills the screen. Tracey Emin pulls her phone back slightly and widens her eyes behind her large, brown-rimmed glasses. Her head rests comfortably against thick white pillows, her graying hair swept back. She looks relaxed. Adjusting a strand that escaped from her bun, she repeats in her clear, high-pitched voice how sorry she is to have missed our previous appointments: “I don’t know if anyone told you I was asleep.”

In recent weeks, the world’s most famous British female artist had been preparing for the February 27 opening of her exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, the largest retrospective ever devoted to her work. More than 90 works (painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture) as well as her installations, including her most famous piece, My Bed (1998). Her bed, in which she believed she might die of grief after a brutal breakup, with its soiled sheets surrounded by empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts, condoms, dirty tissues and blood-stained underwear, caused a scandal when it was shown for the Turner Prize in 1999.

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