After Stockholm and Amsterdam, the "This Will Not End Well" retrospective of Nan Goldin's iconic work as a filmmaker moves to Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, presenting her slide shows and video installations made from thousands of photographs.

Nan Goldin is one of the most avant-garde of contemporary artists. For over forty years, her work has probed the human condition, built around her own life and personal experience. The artist has always focused on social issues where drugs, prostitution, the LGBTQIA+ community, violence, illness and death are intertwined. A journey punctuated by tragedy, from the suicide of her sister Barbara to the deaths of her friends from AIDS. One of her self-portraits, Nan One Month After Being Battered (1984), became a symbol of the fight against violence against women. Over time, her work became a period testimony about her and her circle of friends, whose experiences were defined by "the freedom to live in an alternative world parallel to normative society".

VISUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Her first work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, revolutionized photography. Through slideshows set to music, she recounts the moments of her life with her entourage amid the parties and struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. This visual "diary" soon saw its first exhibition at the Whitney Biennial in 1985, and publication in a photo booklet the following year. She produced several versions of this evolving work, retaining the raw tenderness that has continued to influence generations of artists.
The exhibition "This Will Not End Well" at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin retraces Nan Goldin's ability to revisit her slides, using several projectors and an eclectic soundtrack. While her first slideshows were shown in various clubs and public places in New York, Nan Goldin has produced a dozen different ones over the decades, marking the paradigms of her visual expression. "I always wanted to be a filmmaker. My slideshows are films composed of still images", she asserts.
This retrospective is thus installed in six buildings, designed by architect Hala Wardé, Nan Goldin's long-time collaborator. While each location is conceived in response to the specific work, together they form a village. Her masterwork is accompanied by the series The Other Side, a tribute to her trans friends; Sisters, Saints and Sibyls, a testimony to the trauma of families affected by suicide; Fire Leap, an incursion into the world of children; and Sirens, an exploration of drug addiction.

THE INFLUENCE OF HIS ART

The Neue Nationalgalerie also features Memory Lost, her claustrophobic odyssey through drug withdrawal. Nan Goldin is known for denouncing the opioid crisis from which she herself emerged. In 2017, she founded the association P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and accused the Sacklers of being responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. This American billionaire family, head of the Purdue Pharma laboratory and major patron of museums, is behind the OxyContin scandal, a painkiller considered to be the trigger for this deadly epidemic of overdose and overdose.

The influence of Nan Goldin, now 71, on art and the art world has prompted institutions to refuse the Sacklers' donations. The documentary All the Beauty and Spilled Blood, a portrait of the artist directed by Laura Poitras, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the NSA's large-scale espionage and the Oscar for Citizenfour about Edward Snowden, was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2022.
This major retrospective "This Will Not End Well" continues its international tour, showcasing the revolutionary work of this icon of photography as a filmmaker. After the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, it will continue at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in 2025 and at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2026.

"NAN GOLDIN. THIS WILL NOT END WELL" NEUE NATIONALGALERIE
POTSDAMER STR. 50, BERLIN (GERMANY)
UNTIL APRIL 6, 2025
SMB.MUSEUM