Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well accompanies the major retrospective devoted to Goldin’s work as a filmmaker, foregrounding the immersive power of her slideshows and films. Initiated by Moderna Museet in Stockholm and presented at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and Pirelli HangarBicocca Milan, the exhibition brings together large-scale works composed of thousands of photographs, moving images, sound, and music.
The catalogue is carefully structured to echo the experience of Goldin’s installations. Images are reproduced in continuous sequences against a black ground, preserving the rhythm and emotional intensity of the original projections. Rather than isolating individual photographs, the book emphasises flow, duration, and atmosphere—key to understanding how Goldin constructs narrative through accumulation and repetition.
Twenty accompanying texts, many newly commissioned by Goldin herself, deepen this visual journey. They address recurring themes in her practice: family trauma, intimacy, desire, friendship, addiction, and survival. Together, text and image articulate the emotional force of Goldin’s work, offering insight into both her intentions and the lived experiences embedded within her art.
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1953, Goldin’s photographic language was shaped by an early encounter with loss—the suicide of her sister—and by her later immersion in the countercultural scenes of Boston and New York. Rejecting traditional documentary distance, she turned the camera toward her own life and community, particularly LGBTQ+ circles and underground cultures, using photography as a form of witnessing and connection.
Her landmark slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (first shown in 1985) redefined the medium, merging music, image, and autobiography into a raw chronicle of love, violence, addiction, and care. Subsequent work expanded to include domestic life, motherhood, the AIDS crisis, and later, political activism. In 2017, Goldin founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), using her visibility as an artist to confront the opioid epidemic.
More than a retrospective record, Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well affirms Goldin’s enduring impact on contemporary art. It presents her work not simply as image-making, but as an uncompromising engagement with life’s most difficult realities—where personal history, collective experience, and artistic form remain inseparable.
