Nan Goldin on her ‘final’ retrospective: ‘I don’t have many years left’

The most powerful room at Nan Goldin’s This Will Not End Well – an exhibition made up exclusively of powerful rooms – is, for me, the space showing “Sisters, Saints & Sibyls”, her slideshow dedicated to women who are trapped, literally and figuratively. The film follows the stories of Saint Barbara and Goldin herself, but it’s her sister, Barbara Goldin, who occupies the bulk of the narrative. Barbara was the first of many rebellious women that Goldin would come across in her life – women who were fighting to survive in a world designed to suppress them, and who didn’t always win.

Across three screens, through images and moving pictures, we learn the story of Barbara’s life, up until the moment she lay down in the path of an oncoming commuter train at the age of 18. In one scene Goldin reads out a report about her sister by the doctors at the mental hospital she was put in as a teenager in the 60s. It’s a list of reasons that explain why they are keeping her institutionalised, and why she was deemed unfit to enter back into society.

As images of the long hallways, bare rooms and locked windows of the hospital play on in the background, a couple of reasons stay with me: Barbara refused to shave her legs; Barbara expressed romantic and sexual feelings for other girls. These are all things that might have landed me in an institution had I been born 50 years previously. Standing there in the dark, watching the story unfold, is an almost sublime experience. I start to cry – both mourning for Barbara, and relating to her.

I’ve brought myself too much into this piece maybe. But I’m comforted by a line from Anne Award’s essay in the catalogue which accompanies the exhibition: “To use Nan Goldin’s work as a starting point for a piece of writing without revealing at least a bit of one’s own life feels wrong, almost perverse.” It’s also almost impossible not to have something revealed about yourself through the contemplation of Goldin’s work, which has always been so deeply personal that it transcends to the universal.

Showing now at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, This Will Not End Well brings together six slideshows from across Goldin’s career, spanning the subjects which have so often preoccupied her work: family history, the mystery of childhood, the trans and queer community, the euphoria of drug-induced heights, the lows of addiction. The retrospective is the first time Goldin’s work as a filmmaker is given the sole spotlight and she was adamant that there be no still images hanging on the walls. “I think my slideshows are the most important work I’ve ever done,” Goldin said during the press preview.

The works – which are made up of moving images, voices, found footage and photographs from her archives – are housed in six unique structures designed by Hala Wardé as an extension of and response to the work. Each entrance has a different identity meant to bring you into the piece. “The Other Side”, a tribute to her trans friends beginning in the 70s, is created to give the feeling of a club entrance; “Fire Leap” is a playful maze taking you into Goldin’s foray into the world of children; “Memory Loss” a long, blue-lit corridor designed to emulate the claustrophobic journey through drug withdrawal. To access “Sisters”, you walk up a structure designed like a New York fire escape and watch the big screens from a balcony (although due to safety restrictions, the balcony is no longer as precarious as it was originally intended to be).

The title of the retrospective, This Will Not End Well, is pure Goldin – funny, ironic, a little morbid; it’s a refusal to look at the reality of life and the world with anything but an unflinching gaze. “It’s not meant to be threatening,” she says. “It’s about mortality and, unless you have embraced death, ‘this will not end well’ applies to everyone.” It’s also a reference to what’s going on in the world at large, with climate change and AI “taking over mankind”, as she puts it. “So it’s a warning but it’s also a joke. Although I don’t think most people find it funny,” she says to laughter. 

Mortality is something which Goldin has been thinking about a lot recently. She refers to the retrospective as her final one – “I don’t know if I have that many more years on this planet” – and tells a story of a conversation she had with a famous musician who’s working in AI. “I said to her, ‘What are you doing? We only have a few years’. And she said, ‘Nan, we have a few months.’”  

“So I mean, there is a warning that humanity is going to be struggling. And I live with that fear. That’s the existential dread that we live with, when we look at it. But we try to avoid looking at it all the time, so we can get on with it. So I still make plans, just in case… I think she said that two months ago.”

As well as the current retrospective – which after Amsterdam will travel to Berlin, Milan and Paris – these plans involve printing a nine-volume box set of her slideshows next year, and continuing to work on two or three more. One of the works in This Will Not End Well, “Sirens”, is her first piece assembled from existing footage from other films, and it is a direction she is keen to explore more of. “It’s really fun,” she says. “It’s a real pleasure to work like that.”

Ultimately, Goldin just hopes that the work she makes, which is so personal to her and the people close to her, will make a difference in the way that people look at and go into the world. “When I show the work, the intention is to fight the stigma around mental illness, suicide, AIDS, drug use. And I hope that it will have that effect on people and that they start to let go of these intense stigmas that people carry,” she says. As Vincent van Velsen, curator of photography at the Stedelijk said in the preview, quoting rapper DMX, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering”. If anyone has been able to find meaning in suffering, it has always been Goldin. 

Nan Goldin – This Will Not End Well is on at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from now until 28 January 2024. For more information visit the website here.