This Will Not End Well: Inside Nan Goldin’s major slideshow retrospective

It may sound hyperbolic, but while moving between Nan Goldin’s slideshows at her exhibition This Will Not End Well, it’s possible to feel you’re encountering every seminal bandwidth of human experience: lust, loss, family, friendship, violence, childhood, infirmity, joy, heartache, everything. From The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), her magnum opus, to Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), dedicated to her sister and the trauma of families affected by suicide, and Fire Leap (2010–2022), a poignant homage to the unaffected clear-sightedness of children, the exhibition cannot fail to make your heart swell and soar.

Having already been shown in Stockholm, Amsterdam and Berlin, the exhibition has now arrived at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan’s major centre for contemporary art. The show is unique in that it’s the first to focus on Goldin’s work as a filmmaker. And this iteration, staged in the colossal industrial space of the former Pirelli factory, is additionally special in that it includes two works screened in a museum context for the first time in Europe, alongside an immersive sound installation commissioned for the show.

Many people will be familiar with some of the images from her most famous slideshows, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency or The Other Side (1992-2021), a body of work portraying the artist’s trans friends. But to see these in their intended format, soundtracked by Goldin with a perfect mixture of stirring songs – everything from Maria Callas to The Velvet Underground and Yoko Ono – is something else. To place one picture next to another is a magical act and it immediately sets a story in motion; to place over 700 photographs in a sequence, as Goldin does in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, is a blizzard of stories and fragments of memories. The sheer accumulation of meaning and lives glimpsed makes this one of the most precious and life–affirming experiences you could encounter in an art gallery or museum. 

If you missed her new slideshow Stendhal Syndrome (2024) during this year’s Rencontres d'Arles, you can catch it here in Milan. Taking its name from the psychomatic condition whereby a person experiences dramatic physical and emotional fluctuations when they come into contact with overwhelming beauty or art, Goldin juxtaposes her photographs of classical, renaissance and baroque masterpieces with her portraits of friends and loved ones. She reimagines myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the prism of queer portraiture, moving between her own voiceover narration and a moving soundtrack composed by Soundwalk Collective, with a piece by Mica Levi.

Last year, when This Will Not End Well ran at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Goldin made a powerful speech at its opening denouncing the actions of the Israeli government. In this latest iteration of the exhibition, she previewed a new film composed of footage from the social media of people living in Gaza and newsreels of the genocide. Of all the works on display at Pirelli HangarBicocca, this is the only silent film. No music could augment the horror. In a speech at the Milan preview, she urged the journalists present, “Don’t look away. This should never have happened.”

Despite her powerful evocations of humanity in all its mess and glory, she doesn’t want or believe in the future of humans. You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) is inspired by an ancient myth that an eclipse is caused by animals stealing the sun. It’s a haunting, abstract love letter to animalkind and their inherent innocence. Speaking at the show’s press conference, Goldin explained, “It’s about a world without people, just animals, which is what I actually wish for the future.”

At the same conference, co-curator Roberta Tenconi described the magic of Goldin’s approach to making images: “The way she photographs comes from relationships; it’s not about documenting, it’s about emotion and communication.” Sat in the luxuriant darkness of the pavilions in This Will Not End Well, lit only by the ceaseless rippling fluid movement of the projector and the sequence of images cast in pure light on the screen, there’s a tangible sense that her whole practice is motivated by love. Again, it’s hard not to sound aggrandising, but you feel it throughout this exhibition – the vigorous, courageous love that guides Nan Goldin’s hand.

This Will Not End Well is running at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until 15 February 2025.