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

Nan Goldin is one of the most avant-garde contemporary artists. For over forty years, her work has explored the human condition, built around her life and personal experience. The artist has always focused on social issues intertwined with drugs, prostitution, the LGBTQIA+ community, violence, illness, and death. Her life has been punctuated by tragedies, 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), has become a symbol of the fight against violence against women. Over time, her work has become a contemporary testament to 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 its musical slideshows, she recounts moments from her life with those around her amidst parties and struggles during the 1970s and 1980s. This visual "diary" quickly gained its first exhibition at the Whitney Biennial in 1985 and was published in a photo album the following year. From this evolving work, she created several versions, 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 traces Nan Goldin's ability to revisit her slides using multiple projectors, which she sets to an eclectic soundtrack. While her early slide shows were presented in various clubs and public spaces in New York, 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 slide shows are films composed of still images," she says.
This retrospective is housed in six buildings designed by architect Hala Wardé, a longtime collaborator of Nan Goldin. While each space is conceived in response to a specific work, together they form a village. Her seminal work is presented alongside pieces from the series The Other Side, a tribute to her trans friends; Sisters, Saints and Sibyls, a testament to the trauma experienced by families affected by suicide; Fire Leap, an exploration of 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 organization PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and accuses the Sackler family of being responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. This billionaire American family, at the head of Purdue Pharma and major museum patrons, is at the origin of the OxyContin scandal, a painkiller considered the trigger for this deadly epidemic of overdoses.

The influence of Nan Goldin, now 71, on art and the art world has led institutions to refuse donations from the Sacklers. The documentary *All the Beauty and Blood*, a portrait of the artist directed by Laura Poitras, Pulitzer Prize winner for her work on NSA mass surveillance and Oscar winner for *Citizenfour* about Edward Snowden, received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2022.
This major retrospective, "This Will Not End Well," continues its international tour, showcasing the groundbreaking work of this iconic photographer and filmmaker. After the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, it will travel to the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in 2025 and 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