From October 11, 2025 to February 15, 2026, Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan will host This Will Not End Well, the first retrospective focusing on Nan Goldin’s film work, curated by Fredrik Liew (the presentation in Pirelli HangarBicocca is curated by Roberta Tenconi with Lucia Aspesi), organized by Moderna Museet in collaboration with Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and Réunion des musées nationaux - Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition will present the largest body of slideshows ever exhibited to date, including a new sound installation and, for the first time in Europe in a museum setting, two very recent works by the artist.
The exhibition is divided into several pavilions, architectural structures designed by Hala Wardé, an architect who has long collaborated with Goldin. Each pavilion is conceived in direct relation to a specific work, and together they constitute a “visual village.” Although the titleThis Will Not End Well may evoke a sense of fatalism, it actually also reflects the benevolent irony and characteristic vitality that characterize Goldin’s artistic vision.
The works on display include some of his most celebrated projects: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022), considered his masterpiece; The Other Side (1992-2021), a tribute to the artist’s trans friends through intimate and private shots taken between 1972 and 2010; Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004-2022), which deals with painful family experiences and the theme of suicide; Fire Leap (2010-2022), dedicated to the world of childhood; Memory Lost (2019-2021), a visual exploration of drug withdrawal; and Sirens (2019-2020), which investigates the ecstatic dimension of substance use.
One of the centerpieces of the Milanese exhibition will be Sisters, Saints and Sibyls, which will be placed in the evocative space of the “Cube,” with an installation that faithfully reproduces the original one created in the Chapelle de la Salpêtrière in Paris in 2004. The installation will be repurposed in a form faithful to the original, including the sculptural elements, which are visible from an elevated platform.
Completing the exhibition are two recent slideshows, You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024), Goldin’s first abstract work inspired by an ancient myth related to the solar eclipse, reflecting on life, death and the natural cycles that bind all living things, and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), which takes six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and interweaves them with portraits of the artist’s friends.
Welcoming visitors at the entrance to the exhibition will be a new sound installation created by Soundwalk Coll ective in collaboration with Goldin, designed as a symbolic introduction to the “village” of slideshows.
Nan Goldin, born in Washington, D.C. in 1953, is one of the leading artists on the contemporary scene. Her investigation of the human experience has profoundly influenced successive generations. Her best-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, chronicles a bohemian community between Provincetown, New York, Berlin and London from the 1970s and 1980s onward. Her photographs capture moments of intimacy and sexuality, the everyday and wild parties, highlighting the conflict between autonomy and dependency.
Belonging to a generation that experienced pre-AIDS freedom and an unconventional everyday life, Goldin began screening his slideshows in New York clubs, underground cinemas and European film festivals. On each of these occasions, Goldin updated and re-edited The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, using slide projectors operated directly by her and accompanying with personally selected soundtracks. This continuous reworking has become the stylistic hallmark of her work. Over the course of more than four decades, the artist has created about ten slideshows, to which she has subsequently added moving images, voices and archival materials. Goldin’s influence has also extended to the language of contemporary photography and fashion, profoundly redefining their visual codes.
Goldin was named Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, and has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Kering Women in Motion Award for Photography (2025), the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, Berlin (2022), the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society, London (2018), the Edward MacDowell Medal, New Hampshire (2012), and the Hasselblad Award, Gothenburg, Sweden (2007).
A 216-page catalog (140 illustrated) will be published on the occasion of the exhibition, with contributions by numerous authors including Vince Aletti, Thomas Beard, Guido Costa, Marvin Heiferman, Roni Horn, Patrick Radden Keefe, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Fredrik Liew, Andrea Lissoni, Gabor Maté, Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, Alfred Pacquement, Darryl Pinckney, Rene Ricard, Lucy Sante, Sarah Schulman, Anne Swärd, Hala Wardé, and David Wojnarowicz. The volume, published by Steidl Verlag, is available in English and distributed internationally.
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| At HangarBicocca in Milan, the first retrospective devoted to the film work of Nan Goldin |
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