Nan Goldin has made an unforgettable mark on our time with candid and tender snapshots of intimacy and relationships, everyday life, wild parties, and the struggle between addiction and independence. “This Will Not End Well” is the first exhibition that embraces Goldin’s original vision of how her work is to be experienced. By focusing on slideshows and video installations the exhibition goes back to the roots of Goldin’s artistic practice.
Born in Washington D.C., Nan Goldin started her career in New York in the early 1980s. She presented her work in nightclubs, underground cinemas and film festivals. Live in front of an audience, she showed images organized in slideshows with multiple projectors, set to an eclectic soundtrack.
Her magnum opus work “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, documents Goldin’s bohemian, creative social circle and their world in Provincetown, in Lower Manhattan, Berlin, and London during the 1970s and 80s until recently.
Over the past 50 years, Goldin has produced a dozen separate slideshows with thousands of images. She has added new elements to her works over time, such as moving images, voices, and archival material.
In Nan Goldin’s art, we encounter everything from drug addiction and the darkest sides of withdrawal, as in “Memory Lost” (2019-2020), to family trauma and suicide, as in “Sister, Saints and Sibyls” (2004-2022).
Goldin has always been deeply involved with social issues such as gender, mental health, addiction, and AIDS. In 2017 she founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct action group that aims at holding the wealthy Sackler family accountable for igniting the opioid overdose epidemic that has swept the USA in recent years.
The Sackler family, who are major donors to several prominent international museums around the world, have seen their name erased from many of these institutions due to pressure from P.A.I.N. The work “Memory Lost” is dedicated to P.A.I.N.
