Communion & Shame: A Critical Analysis of Confessional Art through the Comparison of Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) with Jon Rafman's Solo Exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection (2015)
In the pluralistic terrain of contemporary art, personal narrative and mediated experience often collide in revealing ways. Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) and Jon Rafman’s immersive installation in his first solo exhibition Jon Rafman at the Zabludowicz Collection (2015) form a compelling dialectic of oppositional strategies. Emin’s work is grounded in bodily presence and material honesty, engaging a feminist lineage of reclaiming interior space and lived trauma. Rafman’s digital environments, by contrast, stage a masculine, post-internet digestion of the world that is mediated, fragmented, and disembodied.
This essay critically compares these two works, exploring how they construct affect, identity, and narrative through contrasting means. It situates My Bed within traditions of feminist installation and abject expression, and Rafman’s practice within the aesthetics of digital detachment and algorithmic interiority. Drawing on a range of theoretical and critical frameworks from affect theory and media studies to feminist art history and digital aesthetics, it assesses the interpretive tensions and generational shifts each artist reflects. Ultimately, this comparison reveals not only how confessional art navigates the crisis of selfhood but also how it embodies either the radical intimacy of reclaiming or the distanced spectacle of regurgitation.
Emin and Rafman are separated by generation, gender, and intent, but both operate under the umbrella of confessional art. Each positions the viewer within a space of exposure, whether physical or emotional, and frames the artwork as a lens through which personal or cultural trauma is mediated. For Emin, confession is a tool of reclamation. She stages her own reality with all its messiness and contradictions, foregrounding lived experience as political . Rafman, conversely, submerges his own presence within constructed realities that reflect the collective malaise of post-internet identity. “I investigate subjectivity, that is, what hyper-accelerated contemporary existence does to the psyche,” Rafman explains, aligning himself with the generation that grew up online and whose sense of self is shaped by digital immersion rather than introspection.
Emin’s work emerges from the Young British Artists (YBA) milieu of the 1990s and is deeply informed by feminist and autobiographical practices of the 1970s and 80s. Her raw, unfiltered disclosures resonate with the confessional traditions seen in the work of Carolee Schneemann or Nan Goldin, while being situated within a commercial and institutional art world increasingly receptive to spectacle. Rafman, working in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and amidst the rise of social media, reflects a disillusioned generation coping with alienation through digital means. His aesthetics stem from post-internet art and media archaeology, where memory is no longer rooted in personal narrative but diffused through memes, simulations, and algorithmic repetition.
Despite their differences, both artists confront the viewer with uncomfortable proximities. Emin’s strategy is intimate and confrontational. Rafman’s is immersive and estranged. Each reconfigures confession not merely as self-disclosure but as a way to implicate the audience; either as voyeurs or co-conspirators in the broader cultural landscape. This implicating structure is especially relevant when we consider Berger’s assertion that in traditional art “men act and women appear,” and that women have been culturally conditioned to survey themselves constantly from the position of the other (Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, 46–47). Emin’s self-display short-circuits this economy by refusing to present a body as image — instead, she presents the image as aftermath of the body.
Historically, the bedroom has been a gendered site; a space of privacy, sexuality, and subordination, particularly for women. In traditional Western art and literature, the bedroom frequently serves as a stage for voyeurism and eroticisation. From classical painting to contemporary media, female bodies are repeatedly depicted reclining, passive, or asleep; offering themselves to the male gaze. This visual legacy positions the bedroom as a zone of leisure and
submission, reinforcing the objectification of women in domestic space . Emin’s My Bed radically subverts this tradition. Rather than a scene of seduction or repose, her bedroom is a site of collapse, distress, and authenticity. She doesn’t aestheticise her body for consumption; rather, she presents its traces (bodily fluids, tampons, dirty linens) as remnants of emotional and physical trauma. In doing so, Emin reframes the bedroom from a place of feminine passivity to one of active resistance. Her confessional use of domestic space aligns with feminist artists such as Judy Chicago and Louise Bourgeois, who likewise challenged patriarchal spatial politics through personal materiality. Gülsüm Baydar notes that My Bed breaks from the “standard image of the master bedroom” by foregrounding “messiness” and excess, presenting the ungovernable materiality of a woman’s private life as a spectacle not of beauty, but of rupture.
The bedroom also operates metaphorically in Emin’s work; as a psychic space from which the artist attempts to escape. Her confessional strategy transforms the bedroom into a stage of agency: by exposing what is usually hidden, she asserts authorship over her narrative. Emin’s autobiographical fragments challenge both narrative cohesion and cultural norms of feminine As Berger observed, “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself” reinforcing the idea that women’s lived space, including the bedroom, has historically been shaped by the expectation of being seen.decorum, producing a visual excess that resists polished spectacle and forces the viewer into a collaborative, interpretive role. Instead of escape through idealisation, Emin breaks out of the domestic through abjection and radical honesty. Emin’s installation brings the abject into public view; it rejects symbolic cleanliness, embodying instead the “semiotic excess” of what cannot be fully assimilated by rational discourse is especially relevant here.
In contrast, Rafman’s evocation of the bedroom in his digital worlds reflects a shift in gendered dynamics. In his installations, domestic space becomes a screen onto which male anxieties, fantasies, and desires are projected. The virtual bedroom becomes a refuge for disembodied masculinity. These spaces are not about intimacy but about simulation and control . As Rafman has reflected, his work captures “the psychic consequences of digital immersion,” a condition of identity formation that emerges not from embodied experience but from “doomscrolling”; an aesthetics of overconsumption, fragmentation, and alienation (Rafman in Interview Magazine, 2023).
In contemporary post-internet culture, male users often appropriate domestic settings as zones of performative identity. Through avatars, vlogs, and streaming environments, the domestic is no longer confined to physical interiors but extends into digital platforms. Here, the bedroom is not a space of constraint but of unregulated fantasy; a place where toxic masculinity can fester under the guise of safety and anonymity. Rafman’s art doesn’t necessarily critique this dynamic directly; rather, it stages it with a hallucinatory ambivalence that blurs complicity and critique. Gene McHugh describes this shift as central to post-internet art: “not art that uses the internet as a medium, but art that emerges from the conditions the internet creates” (McHugh, Post-Internet, 2011). In Rafman’s case, these conditions include estranged affect, fragmented memory, and a disavowal of bodily vulnerability.
The comparison between Emin and Rafman underscores a generational and gendered divergence. Emin’s reclamation of the bedroom is an act of embodied protest, emerging from a context in which the female artist had to fight for the legitimacy of her pain. Rafman, conversely, constructs simulated interiors from the perspective of a post-human observer; masculine identity fragmented, mediated, yet still dominant in its voyeuristic lens. Baydar argues that feminine excess disrupts the clean lines of patriarchal visual culture, defying the ideal of the private, controlled, silent bedroom.
Emin’s material honesty, spatial directness, and refusal to mediate pain through stylisation offer a framework for art-making that is emotionally and politically urgent. Rafman’s worlds, while visually rich, often feel emotionally sterile; a reflection of the culture he documents . Rafman’s installation at the Zabludowicz Collection includes a constructed, artificial bedroom: three walls and a carpeted floor approximating a domestic interior. It resembles a set, a stage; one that evokes the bedroom of a teenage girl. This theatrical simulation draws attention to the artificiality of the space, which, rather than suggesting intimacy, signals voyeurism. The viewer becomes a spectator in a staged domestic scene, implicating themselves in Rafman’s position as a male artist navigating online subcultures and affective detachment. The dynamic Rafman constructs aligns with what Berger identifies in historical painting; the feminine as staged for male consumption, made to be seen rather than to see (Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, 47).
This simulated bedroom isn’t based on Rafman’s lived experience, but rather on an amalgamation of internet iconography and cultural tropes. It channels the aesthetics of webcam culture, teen influencers, and soft-core nostalgia; blending innocence and disquiet. The uncanny, theatrical space mirrors Rafman’s practice of digital voyeurism: collecting, editing, and re-presenting found images and fantasies from the depths of online culture. The work’s strength lies in this doubling; the physical bedroom installation isn’t a lived site, but a material trace of desires, created and consumed at a distance. Artie Vierkant defines post-internet objects as works whose “particular materiality” is inseparable from “their vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination”; they are made to be circulated more than inhabited, their affect produced as spectacle (Vierkant, 2010).
Emin’s My Bed, conversely, recontextualises a real space within the art gallery. By transplanting her unmade bed and its surrounding detritus into the white cube, Emin transforms a private, emotionally charged site into a public tableau. Her audience becomes a collective voyeur, confronted not with fantasy, but with the physical reality of lived crisis. The gesture is one of radical transparency, in which the gallery becomes a frame for self-exposure, and the viewer, implicated in the ethics of looking. Smith and Watson describe this tactic as “the rumpled bed of autobiography”, a form in which the disorder of domestic space challenges both narrative coherence and cultural scripts of femininity.
Emin’s bedroom invites empathetic identification and disrupts the aesthetics of cleanliness and control. Rafman’s imagined bedroom reveals how digital culture stages the domestic as a curated performance. His constructed room reflects the ways young women’s bedrooms are often consumed and replicated online as aesthetic tropes (saturated with fairy lights, pastel tones, and symbolic clutter) stripped of interiority and turned into an algorithmic style. By staging such a room, Rafman draws attention to his position not as insider, but as observer, replicating and aestheticising a form of femininity he cannot inhabit. As Judith Butler might argue, such performances of gendered space reveal not a stable identity but “a stylized repetition of acts” — a signifier of femininity produced for others rather than lived for oneself (Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990, 191).
This distinction matters. Emin speaks from the space she inhabits; emotionally, physically, culturally, while Rafman comments on a space he consumes. One reclaims; the other digests. Emin’s work is marked by the politics of presence while Rafman’s operates through mediated distance. As a result, Emin’s confessional staging subverts the gallery’s detachment, while Rafman’s installation uses simulation to highlight the flattening of experience in post-internet visual culture. McHugh emphasises that post-internet art often reflects “the exhaustion of being constantly online,” where images no longer refer to bodies but to a spiralling archive of representations (McHugh, Post-Internet, 2011).
Shame, as both affect and strategy, operates centrally in the work of both artists. Emin lays bare the intimate contours of depression, heartbreak, and vulnerability. Her work invites empathy but also discomfort. Viewers are not merely witnesses; they are implicated. By presenting her bed in a public forum, she collapses the boundary between the personal and the political. As Berger reminds us, the act of making private space visible is not neutral; it is historically tied to systems of power and visibility that render some lives more legible than others (Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, 52).
Rafman’s approach to shame is more oblique. His avatars, grotesque and glitched, reflect a culture of suppressed affect. His work does not express shame so much as simulate the conditions that produce it: alienation, nostalgia, compulsive voyeurism. There is no singular self to confess but a stream of fragmented images and anonymised narratives. Rafman’s installations are haunted not by the presence of shame, but by its absence; by a cultural numbness that renders confession aesthetic rather than cathartic. Kristeva suggests that the abject “draws me toward theplace where meaning collapses,” and in Rafman’s worlds, meaning often collapses under the weight of surplus representation (Kristeva, 1982, 2).
One invites communion, the other distance. Both are valid, but their ethical stakes differ. Emin risks being dismissed as narcissistic and Rafman risks being complicit in the very alienation he portrays. Judith Butler helps us understand this in terms of performative legibility: “It is through the body that gender is performed, and it is only through certain legible performances that one is recognisable as a subject” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990, xxiv). Emin’s abjection becomes legible through pain and risk. Rafman’s bedroom refuses this legibility; it oscillates in an ambiguous space where subjectivity is flattened by aesthetic detachment.
What lessons can be drawn from these confessional modes? Emin teaches that shame, when externalised, loses its power. Her work is an act of survival, a refusal to be silenced by stigma. Rafman suggests that shame, when internalised and aestheticised, becomes a loop; an endlessly replayed simulation that neither heals nor resolves. In a 2023 interview, Rafman remarked, “I’m trying to reflect what it feels like to live in this world right now; overstimulated, fragmented, haunted by images you can’t explain” (Rafman in Interview Magazine, 2023). The psychic condition he identifies here is not redemptive. It is ambient, dissociative, and unresolved.
In my current series, Framing Devices, I draw deeply from the lineage of confessional art and affective installation, tracing a lineage that includes both Emin’s embodied shame and Rafman’s digital estrangement. This series comprises assemblages of flattened personal ephemera, digital animations of imagined bedrooms, and mixed media textile works constructed from used bedsheets, items that carry the traces of shame, intimacy, and memory. Like Emin, I am interested in transforming the bedroom from a space of concealment to a space of confrontation. As Baydar writes, “By bringing the messiness of everyday life out of the closet, these artists make powerful statements” about the boundaries between public and private, and the feminised spaces traditionally excluded from serious art (Baydar, 2012, 33).
Objects such as pregnancy tests, food diaries, tabloid magazines, used condoms, diary entries, and food stains are not displayed for shock but arranged delicately, often alongside soft or meditative materials. The intent is to unearth shame not as spectacle, but as portraiture; a poetic framing of the conditions that shape my own becoming. This gesture echoes Emin’s insistence on the legitimacy of lived experience and the radical potential of reclaiming abjection.
My work also reflects Rafman’s awareness of how images shift in emotional register. The digital bedrooms in Framing Devices are fabricated but intentionally unstable. Walls flicker, objects sit unnaturally, proportions warp; mimicking both the aesthetic of online dreamscapes and the instability of memory itself. These spaces neither promise safety nor invite total immersion. They resist the polished escapism of Rafman’s installations, foregrounding instead the labor of reconstruction; piecing together a narrative through the debris of daily life.
The use of textiles (particularly stained or worn bedsheets) draws direct influence from Emin’s material honesty. Fabric functions as skin, archive, and barrier. It carries the imprint of the body while also suggesting concealment. Through stitching, layering, and hanging, I approach textiles as both medium and metaphor: a surface onto which intimacy is inscribed, a frame that structures the viewer’s engagement with objects of private shame. Rather than presenting trauma as collapse, Framing Devices seeks a language of meditation and growth. Assemblages are composed with care and stillness, positioning shame as a catalyst for transformation rather than paralysis. There is no cleansing of the past, but an invitation to see it anew.
If Emin’s installation screams and Rafman’s murmurs, Framing Devices breathes. The visual mess becomes a slow exhalation of experience, framed not as spectacle, but as ritual. Emin’s My Bed and Rafman’s Zabludowicz installation represent two poles of confessional art. Emin’s work is visceral, immediate, and deeply embodied. Rafman’s is distant, constructed, and controlled. Both reflect and shape contemporary understandings of selfhood, gender, and vulnerability.
By situating their practices in relation to one another, we see how confessional art evolves in response to changing technologies and cultural pressures. Emin reclaims the domestic as a site of feminist resistance. Rafman turns it into a stage for digital melancholy. Each offers a unique lens through which to view the politics of privacy, performance, and perception. Their art reminds us that confession is never just about the self. It is always about the audience, the space of display, and the systems of meaning that make certain disclosures legible and others unspeakable. As artists and viewers, we are invited to consider our own roles in this exchange, and to confront what we choose to reveal, conceal, or simulate.
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