The Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, traditionally a staid showcase for the amateur painters of middle England, is to be “sexed up” by Tracey Emin, the artist best known for putting her own love life on display.

Emin has been given a room to curate at the exhibition and intends to fill it with erotic works by other artists that make her feel “excited and feverish”.

The items chosen by the 44-year-old artist include a video of a naked woman using barbed wire as a Hula Hoop and a picture of a zebra mounting a human.

“I won’t disappoint anyone who expects outrage,” said Emin, whose works have included her own unmade bed, littered with condoms and dirty underwear, and a tent with the names of everyone she had slept with up until 1995.

The summer exhibition, held annually since 1768, is open to any artist who can put their work before a committee. Although a number of more avant-garde works have been shown in recent years, some critics dismiss the event as middlebrow.

Another aspect has been to invite members of the academy to curate rooms of their own. Emin, who was elected to the academy last year, is one of those chosen to assemble a room of works for this year’s show, which opens on June 9 and runs until mid-August.

Emin said she was deliberately making the room erotic in an attempt to shock some visitors. “I don’t think posh ladies will come into my room and feel let down because they can’t find any pubic hair,” she said.

By choosing sex as her theme, Emin also hopes to exact a measure of artistic revenge. “I want to curate something which would upset Ruskin because he destroyed Turner’s pornographic art and I won’t forgive him for that,” she said.

After J M W Turner’s death in 1851, John Ruskin, the Victorian poet and art critic, is reputed to have burnt the artist’s erotic drawings in an attempt to protect his reputation, although this story has been called into question in recent years.

In total, Emin has chosen about 20 exhibits for her room. One, which is 5ft high, shows a zebra having sex with a naked woman. The 1992 work was created by Mat Collishaw, her former boyfriend, and is now owned by Damien Hirst, a fellow Britartist.

Other works selected by Emin, who was Britain’s representative at the Venice Biennale art show last year, include a video by Sigalit Landau, the Israeli artist, which shows a naked woman performing a Hula Hoop routine with barbed wire. The longer it goes on, the more cut and bloody she becomes.

The room will also display a sculpture by Rebecca Warren, who was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2006 and specialises in suggestive exhibits of large women.

Emin defends Warren’s sculpture along with other sexually charged works by Vincent Hawkins, a painter, and Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, a sculptor. “Personally I like things like that,” she said. “I want to go to an art exhibition which makes me feel excited and feverish.”

She has also included a porcelain sculpture of human figures by Rachel Kneebone, 35, who has already exhibited at London’s White Cube gallery.

Aside from Emin’s room, other works among about 2,000 being exhibited will include five abstract steel structures by Sir Anthony Caro, which will dominate the courtyard at the academy, off Piccadilly in central London. They are intended to convey the sensation of walking.

The artists Jake and Dinos Chapman have bought 20 paintings by Adolf Hitler and defaced them with hippie motifs for a new show opening this week.

The brothers, along with their White Cube gallery, spent more than £100,000 on 17 water-colours and some oils, which have all been authenticated.

Jake Chapman described most of the dictator’s works as awful landscapes, adding: “We have prettified them.”

Abroad canvas

— The Royal Academy’s summer exhibition has been held every year since 1769.

— The exhibition mixes works by unknown and famous artists and is the biggest of its kind in the world. It receives about 120,000 visitors a year.

— Great works unveiled there have included JMW Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, shown in 1844.

— Controversial exhibits included last year’s charcoal drawing of a naked Tony and Cherie Blair, a protest about the Iraq war by Michael Sandle.

Watch Anthony Carol talking about his installation

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