Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well

Icon of contemporary photography, Nan Goldin is exhibited as a filmmaker. The Grand Palais presents the first retrospective in France devoted to her videos and slideshows, which the artist describes as “films made up of stills”. An intimate journey through her life, her friendships, her loves, and her struggles. Nan Goldin (born in Washington D.C. in 1953) is recognized as a major artist who has revolutionized contemporary photography and visual culture of our time. From 1979 to the present, she has produced numerous slideshows from thousands of photographs she has taken of her everyday life, her close circle, their intimacy, and family events. Her narratives, drawn from her own experience, explore themes such as childhood, gender, violence and drug addiction. Raw and intimate, the stories she reveals stand as universal tales of love and loss. At the Grand Palais, the exhibition is installed in buildings designed by the architect Hala Wardé. Each building is designed in response to the specific piece it houses; together, they constitute a village. This village extends to the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, where the installation conceived for this space in 2004 as part of the Festival d’Automne, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls , is presented. The exhibition brings together six major works covering fifty years of work: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), her magnum opus; The Other Side (1992–2021), a homage to her trans friends photographed between 1972 and 2010; Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), a testament to the trauma of families and the taboo of suicide; Memory Lost (2019–2021), a claustrophobic journey through drug withdrawal; Sirens (2019–2020), a trip into drug ecstasy; and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a work based on six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses , which explores the condition described by Stendhal as a collapse provoked by the overwhelming beauty of art. While the title of the exhibition This Will Not End Well may seem dark and foreboding, it is also full of irony and emotion. According to Fredrik Liew, curator for the retrospective, it reflects Nan Goldin’s ‘characteristically unshakeable joie de vivre’. After travelling to Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Milan, the exhibition now arrives in Paris, at the Grand Palais and the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, offering a unique immersion into Nan Goldin’s intimate, moving, and profoundly human world. The exhibition is organized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in collaboration with the GrandPalaisRmn, Paris, the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan.