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A Poetics of Intimacy, Rupture and Survival
Few artists have altered the visual language of intimacy as profound as Nan Goldin. In her latest exhibition, This Will Not End Well, Goldin does more than revisit the emotional territory that made her seminal work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a landmark: she deepens it, creating something more fractured and prophetic — and perhaps more unsettlingly lucid.
“I have always wanted to be a film maker. My slideshows are films made up of stills.”
Nan Goldin
From beginning of her career, Nan Goldin has insisted that the still image never her destination. She has often spoken of her desire to be a film maker, to construct not isolated photographs, but sequences, durations, and emotional arcs. This Will Not End Well realizes that ambition with striking clarity: this is not a photography exhibition in the conventional sense, but a constellation of short films, five immersive video works, composed from decades of her photographic archive.
Installed as a series of enclosed environments, the exhibition unfolds spatially as much as temporarily. Each room functions as a cinematic chamber, with its own rhythm, soundtrack, and emotional register. The viewer does not move from image to image, but from film to film, from one atmosphere to another. This scenography approach transforms Goldin’s practice into something closer to expanded cinema, where memory is not fixed but continuously reactivated through projection, sound, and duration.
Each film, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, “The Other Side”, “Sisters, Saints and Sibyls”, “Fire Leap”, “Memory Lost” constructs a distinct emotional terrain. One dwells on the ecstasy and fragility of love; another traces the ravages of addictionand the body under duress; a third hovers in the spectral space of loss, where absence becomes almost tangible. Together, they form a fragmented yet cohesive portrait of a community, Goldin’s “chosen family” whose lives are marked by intensity, precarity, and resilience.
What is particularly striking is how the installation reframes Goldin’s images. Removed from the static authority of the photographic print and set into motion, the acquire a new ontology. This cinematic format allows Goldin to choreograph not only what we see, but how long we feel it. Duration becomes a critical tool: certain images linger unbearably, while others pass in a blur, mimicking the uneven of lived experience.
The soundtracks, integral to each piece, further reinforce this shift toward filmic language. Music does not merely accompany the images; it structures them, guiding emotional transitions and binding disparate moments into a shared sensibility. In this sense, Goldin’s work aligns less with traditional photography than with a deeply personal form of montage, recalling affinities with artists such as Sophie Calle in its autobiographic intensity, or Wolfgang Tillmans in its fluid movement between media, yet always retaining her unmistakable rawness.
The exhibition architecture reinforces its conceptual core. The darkened rooms, the scale of projection, the immersive soundscapes, all contribute to a heightened sense of intimacy that paradoxically feels both collective and solitary. Viewers gather yet remain enclosed within their own emotional responses. The space itself becomes a site of shared vulnerability, echoing the relational dynamics that have always defined Goldin’s work.
The title This Will Never End Well encapsules the emotional paradox at the core of Nan Goldin’s practice: a coexistence of fragility and resilience, despair, and irresistable vitality. Far from purely pessimistic statement, it reflects an acute awareness of the inevitability of loss, shaped by histories of love, addiction, and the AIDS crisis, while insisting on the persistence of connection and desire.
The exhibition conceived by Swedish curator and Chief Curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Fredrik Liew, known for his focus on contemporary and time-based art practices. Liew’s curatorial approach is both rigorous and intuitive, structured around five immersive film installations that unfold within a scenographic “village” conceived with architect Hala Wardé.
Presented at the Grand Palais, Paris, This Will Not End Well, by Nan Goldin, runs until “1 June 2026, marking the final stage of its international itinerary.
