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Tracey Emin embraces Islam

Labhrainn | 29.08.2008 13:14 | Culture | Education | Social Struggles

Disgusted by her own immodesty and lack of cleanliness, Tracey Emin - the enfant terrible of British art – has decided to turn over a new leaf and become a Muslim.



Her exhibit, "My Clean Bedroom" has been cleared of the vodka bottles, cigarette butts and dirty underwear.

"I now clean myself with water after going to the bathroom", said Tracey, "rather than smearing myself with paper and having dirty underwear like most British people".

"Tracey Emin: 20 Years" also features "Conversations With My Mum", a video of her talking to her mother in a kind and caring way, and "It's Not The Way I Want To Die", a model of a grandmother in an old people's home in her town of Margate, southern England.

The show, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, has attracted more than 13,000 visitors in the three weeks since it opened, but many critics have been scathing, accusing her of being clean, modest and respectable.

Before her conversion, most of the works focused on the artist's own life - her teenage years, being raped at the age of 13, relationships and fears about never being a mother - with an unblinking intensity.

But now the hijab-wearing artist has turned her life around " like no other artist before her," wrote Patrick Elliott, the exhibition's curator, in its catalogue.

Emin had gradually become part of the art establishment - she became a member of the Royal Academy in 2007 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale last year. But this will now change.

She now draws stinging reviews from some critics.

"By the end of this show, I felt as if someone had been shouting at me down the phone for a couple of hours -- a kind of emotional earache," The Guardian newspaper's reviewer wrote.

"Why a clean bed? Where are the cigarette ends? Why is she performing the tasks of a housewife? Why doesn't she show her stomach like any normal British female?"

The Times was hardly more flattering - "What distresses me far more than Emin's taste for the prim and proper ... is her amazing, unshakable faith in one God," its reviewer said.

Visitors to the Edinburgh show were divided in their reactions, meanwhile.

"Heavy, boring, rubbish" and "personal, thought-provoking, absorbing" were just two of the comments left in a visitors book.

The show runs in Edinburgh until November 9 and travels to the Contemporary Art Centre in Malaga, Spain from November 28 to February 22, 2009, and the Art Museum in Bern, Switzerland from March 10 to June 21, 2009.

Labhrainn

Comments

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Neat spoof

29.08.2008 15:09



Not entirely sure what the point of reposting a fictional spoof on Indymedia is, though.

Norville B