Tracey Emin’s unmade bed
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1999, Dame Tracey Emin’s unmade bed was nominated for Britain’s prestigious Turner art prize opening up conversations about how we define art.
The installation titled, My Bed, was Dame Tracey’s bed surrounded by empty bottles and detritus.
Dame Tracey said: “It’s like a time capsule of a woman from the '90s.”
After eventually losing out on the Turner prize, she sold her piece for $200,000. She says: “The bed itself has become a national treasure of sorts”.
Natasha Fernandes uses Dame Tracey’s 2024 interview with BBC 100 Women to tell the story of her famous artwork.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Photo: Dame Tracey Emin and her unmade bed. Credit: Niklas Halle'n/AFP via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:39.7 | Hi, this is the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:43.9 | I'm Natasha Fernandez, part of the Witness History team. |
| 0:47.4 | We're the podcast that takes you back to a key moment in history, |
| 0:50.4 | and we bring it all to life through incredible archive and the amazing memories of a key witness. |
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| 1:09.3 | For the amazing story I've got for you today, we're going back to |
| 1:12.6 | 1999 when a British artist's most famous work of an unmade bed was nominated for a prestigious |
| 1:18.9 | art prize. This is art. Well, to be honest, it's not actually. It's an unmade bed, but a very |
| 1:26.2 | similar one, slept in by Tracy Eamin, has turned out to be the star attraction at the Tate Gallery. And she's a hot favourite for the Turner Prize tonight. |
| 1:34.1 | That's BBC television presenter Nick Ross, hosting a debate about conceptual and modern art. On the day, the winner of the prestigious Turner Art Prize was announced, the camera pans to him |
| 1:45.2 | lying down on a recreation of an art installation called My Bed, surrounded by empty bottles and |
| 1:51.0 | disheveled books on a bedside table. |
| 1:53.0 | Like this one, it's got all sorts of dirty knickers and condoms and I'm not going to look |
... |
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