Â鶹Éç

Provocative artists Jake and Dinos Chapman reveal why they have recreated the Tracey Emin work lost in a 2004 warehouse fire for their major new exhibition.

Ahead of their In the Realm of the Unmentionable show, which opened at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings on 25 October 2014, Jake Chapman discusses their ‘homage’ to Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 – which the controversial brothers have called The Same Thing, Only Better.

Emin’s work, also known as The Tent, featured 102 appliqued names of everyone she had slept with – in the literal sense, so including family members and friends as well as sexual partners – up to the time of its creation.

It was lost when a blaze ripped through the Momart warehouse in east London in May 2004, destroying an estimated £50million worth of art, including more than 100 pieces from Charles Saatchi’s collection. Works by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and the Chapman brothers themselves were among the other casualties.

While assembling the piece during the filming of Â鶹Éç Four’s What Do Artists Do All Day?, Chapman explains that Emin has refused to remake it herself because she was so emotionally connected to the work, and argues that by simply making an exact copy, their own recreation disinvests it of any true artistic content. The full programme will be screened on Â鶹Éç Four on November 5.