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<\/a>Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n <\/a>Untitled, 1982. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Amanda at the sauna, Hotel Savoy, Berlin, 1993. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Gina and Bruce\u2019s dinner party, NYC , 1991. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Brian and Nan in Kimono, 1983. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n Forty years on, the very awkwardness of the editing still moves: blunt cuts, abrupt sequencing, the handmade charm of the mixtapes and Polaroids that were traded back then. Goldin tears away a veil, that of a marginal world as no one had ever seen it before, without glamour or distance. This is the door through which so many art students entered her work. This is the door one returns to.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Other Side\u201d (1992\u20132021) extends that first shock. Named after a Boston bar where the young Goldin lived in the early 1970s alongside a group of drag queens, the slideshow celebrates, between 1972 and 2010, the gender euphoria of her trans friends. Teased beehives, gold bralettes, steel-blue wigs, motels, cabarets: pride stands in for a kingdom, and death already prowls.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>C putting on her make-up at Second Tip, Bangkok, 1992. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Jimmy Paulette on David\u2019s bike, NYC, 1991. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Christmas at The Other Side, Boston, 1972. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Self Portrait at New Year\u2019s Eve, Malibu California, 2006. <\/p>\n <\/a>French Chris at the Drive-in, N.J, 1979. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n \u201cMemory Lost\u201d (2019\u20132021), the third slideshow, plunges into the shadows of addiction: the images are blurred, punctuated by messages left on answering machines in the 1980s, the score by Mica Levi (the British composer behind the soundtracks of the films Under the Skin and Jackie) and pieces by Soundwalk Collective. One shudders hearing the voices of her lost friends; one shares her claustrophobia, that of a life on opioids. There, in the organic matter of lived experience, Goldin remains sovereign.<\/p>\n Then comes the other slope. With \u201cSirens\u201d (2019\u20132020), her first work made entirely of found footage, the photographer arranges excerpts borrowed from some thirty films to evoke chemical ecstasy. \u201cStendhal Syndrome\u201d (2024) sets portraits of her loved ones against masterpieces from the Louvre, with passages from Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses read in voice-over and a symphonic score.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Greer modeling jewelry, NYC, 1985. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Joey laughing, Hotel Ritz, 2001. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Young Love, 2024. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n The images answer one another in a play of echoes between Caravaggio\u2019s canvases, Bernini\u2019s sculptures and Goldin\u2019s intimate circle. A cold beauty, perhaps, but one that completes a logic: by editing and re-editing the same body of work, Goldin has made repetition a method, and it is precisely that obstinate revisiting her admirers come looking for. The same faces return from one slideshow to the next, in another order, set to other music. The work folds in on itself like a scratched record that is also a spell.<\/p>\n Then, at the end of every slideshow, something breaks the loop. Each montage now closes on a tribute to Gaza, which Goldin says has haunted her work for more than two years. The piece in progress, presented in draft form, assembles sequences shot on the ground by journalists most of whom were targeted, by friends who managed to travel there, by the inhabitants themselves. Some of the images are unbearable: lifeless children\u2019s bodies, ruins, hollow-eyed faces, overwhelmed hospitals.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Still from Sirens, 2019-2020. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Young hermaphrodite sleeping, Le Louvre, 2010. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not the time for denial and amnesia. We can\u2019t look away from the suffering of Gaza,\u201d the artist states. This eruption of the present extends an older commitment. In 2017, the photographer founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct-action group targeting the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma and held responsible for the opioid crisis that has killed more than 700,000 people in the United States since 1999.<\/p>\n Laura Poitras\u2019s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice in 2022, brought that fight to the screen. The actions staged inside museums have led most major institutions to strip the Sackler name from their walls. With Goldin, activism never settles into doctrine: it proceeds through acts, through denunciation, through the sheer insistence on showing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Clemens eating grapes under my arbour, Sag Harbor, NY, 2001. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Thomas as a ghost, Boston, 1977. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n The route ends at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re, in the 13th arrondissement, where \u201cSisters, Saints, Sibyls\u201d (2004\u20132022) returns to its place of origin, conceived for the Festival d\u2019Automne in 2004. The hospital precinct, which long confined women deemed mad, takes in the elegy devoted to Barbara Holly Goldin, Nan\u2019s older sister, institutionalized in adolescence and then dead by suicide on a railway track in April 1965, at eighteen. Nan was eleven.<\/p>\n The three-channel video weaves together three female narratives: that of Saint Barbara, beheaded by her father; that of Barbara Goldin; and that of the artist herself, who recounts her own commitments. A tribute, Goldin says, to all the rebellious women who fight to survive within society.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Barbara in Mask, Washington D.C. \u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n There, in this echo that runs back to the inaugural wound, one understands why the slideshows serve the two facets of a single life: photography as a bulwark against disappearance and as a political summons.<\/p>\n The loop and the breach.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, chapel st Louis \u00a9 Courtesy of the artist. Photo Simon Lerat for the GrandPalaisRmn 2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, chapel st Louis \u00a9 Courtesy of the artist. Photo Simon Lerat for the GrandPalaisRmn 2026<\/p>\n Nan Goldin\u2019s exhibition \u201cThis Will Not End Well\u201d<\/a> is on show at the Grand Palais<\/a> (17, avenue du G\u00e9n\u00e9ral-Eisenhower, Paris 8e) and at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re (47, boulevard de l\u2019H\u00f4pital, Paris 13e) through June 21, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five black pavilions, designed by the architect Hala Ward\u00e9, house her slideshows in the salon d\u2019honneur of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,17346,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-596913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-template-cover-simple","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Nan Goldin<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n