The great Nan Goldin exhibition now in Berlin

Nan Goldin's (Washington, 1963) photographs constitute a public diary of her memories. When she talks about what photography is to her, she refers to it as an uncontrollable urge, describing the camera as an extension of her arm. Her impromptu snapshots speak of her life and the lives of those closest to her, within the drag queen scene - her family by choice - in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s New York City, around the Bowery, East Village, and the vibrant Tin Pan Alley of Times Square.

Just a stone's throw from the Bowery, the Mudd Club, a historic nightclub of the New York underground scene, in 1979 hosted the show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in which Nan Goldin presented photographs from her eponymous series in the format of a diary slide show set to music.

The exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, titled This Will Not End Well, open to the public from November 23, 2024, to April 6, 2025, moves on from this filmic practice of Goldin's and presents the American photographer for the first time in the role of filmmaker, with an impressive body of work, covering all aspects of her life and career.

On why she made this choice, the artist talked about how she always wanted to be a filmmaker and how cinema has been a fundamental means of expression for her, ever since her childhood and adolescence, spent in the Orson Welles cinema in Cambridge, watching experimental works such as Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), and then the work of Warhol and the films of Big Hollywood actresses such as Marilyn, Marlene Dietrich, and Barbara Stanwyck.

The installation, created in collaboration with architect Hala Wardé, is designed as an agglomeration of six small cinemas, six separate rooms, each hosting a screening. Some of the slideshows on display are the same ones she used to set up at her home screenings for her friends, who are also the subjects of her photos, poetic, poignant, full of melancholy. 

This exhibition format has allowed Goldin to always make further changes over time, adding or removing photographs, in an attempt to achieve a narrative effectiveness that can only be achieved through this kind of presentation mode, as opposed to the more completed and definitive format of the book.

The six screenings in the exhibition present six major works by Nan Goldin. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022) her magnum opus, first shown in Berlin at the 1986 Berlinale; The Other Side (1992-2021) a tribute to her family of friends celebrating freedom from gender definitions, about which Goldin writes in the book published in 1992, “The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners of the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring.” The series Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (2004-2022), is a testament to the traumas of family and suicide, starting from the story of his sister Barbara, who died by suicide at the age of eighteen; in Fire Leap (2010-2022) Goldin explores the uniqueness of children, of their unscrupulousness and originality, photographing the children of friends in shots marked by a surprising spontaneity.

The last two series in the exhibition, which are more recent, include Memory Lost (2019-2021), a claustrophobic journey through drug withdrawal, and Sirens (2019-2020), Goldin's first work made entirely from found footage, scenes from some of her favorite films, along with a soundtrack. Echoing the call of the sirens of Greek mythology, this is a hypnotic work that introduces the viewer to the sensuality and ecstasy of drug effects.

This Will Not End Well is on a third European stop after those in Stockholm at the Moderna Museet and Amsterdam at the Stedelijk Museum. After Berlin, the exhibition will travel to Italy in the fall of 2025 in the Navate of Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, to eventually land at the Grand Palais in Paris in the spring of 2026.

Opening image: Nan Goldin, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973. Photography from the series “The Other Side”. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist