by Jesse Slater // Jan. 17, 2025
Nan Goldin’s ‘This Will Not End Well’ at Neue Nationalgalerie is an exercise in confrontation. Comprising six distinct slideshows spanning five decades of image-making, the exhibition presents Goldin’s direct and unwavering gaze, from how she sees her adored friends to the conditions of life for those othered by healthcare systems. Moving from work to work, I feel in awe, I’m laughing, winded, dulled out with loss. Goldin’s directness invites something: the wordless associations that arise when presented with the unfiltered realities of others’ lives.
Nan Goldin: ‘Brian and Nan in Kimono,’ 1983, photography, from the series ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ // © Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist
It turned out I was most drawn to ‘Fire Leap,’ a montage of images of Goldin’s godchildren and the children of her friends. It reads like a slideshow of family photos, some tilted or blurred, each given the same attention as the one before. Pregnant bellies bob in bath water. A curled up baby nestles in the crease of a sofa with a cat watching from above. Cookie Mueller and her son Max gaze at one another, eyes on the same level, as if asking permission from each other. Kids fly through the air, dress up, are caught in moments of upset, anguish, immersion.
Nan Goldin: ‘Elephant mask,’ Boston, 1985, photo from the series ‘Fire Leap’ // © Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist
The images pulled me back to growing up with my sister, how when we played, we’d trade in our rugrat day clothes for feather boas and plastic kids’ high heels we’d call “clonkers,” stuff our tops so we looked pregnant, or had a chest, performing gender as a big game, like fantastical drag we could pick and choose. ‘Fire Leap’ captures all that play, the honesty of being a kid, the extremities of emotion that adulthood has a way of diluting.
Nan Goldin: ‘Self-portrait with eyes turned inward,’ Boston, 1989, photo from the series ‘Sisters, Saints and Sybils’ // © Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist
Only, Goldin doesn’t dilute. I notice this raw directness in Goldin’s gaze, too. In ‘Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls’—an ode to Goldin’s sister Barbara who died by suicide aged 18—the directness is almost forensic in form. The three-channel work is accompanied by music and Goldin’s narration in an affectless tone. It paces through Barbara’s life and death with broad, steady strokes–from giddy family photos and footage of later visits to the institution Barbara was held in as a teen, to the coroner’s report recounting the facts of Barbara’s death and matter-of-fact images of Goldin’s own self-harm wounds held blankly to the camera. There’s no sentimentality; the work is more immediate than that. It presents bare realities in tender detail.
Nan Goldin: ‘This Will Not End Well,’ installation view, Neue Nationalgalerie, 2024 // © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photo by David von Becker
The monumental soundtrack of ‘Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls’ plays loudest in the exhibition–orchestral soars, Nan’s voice, piercing sirens, piano, wailing. It holds me upright as I move around the space, in a loop of confrontation, the sounds rehashing like bad memories. The exhibition itself is laid out like a “village” populated with tall, dark tents made in collaboration with architect Hala Wardé. They feel cold and scripted to me, bureaucratic somehow. The structures are meant to resemble a playhouse, a hospital, a movie theater, a queer club, but come off as solutions; maybe for the problem of existing within an institution. In contrast, the architecture’s pallid blankness only makes Goldin’s images feel more direct, connected to the outside world, to lived experience.
The frankness takes a turn towards ecstatic intimacy in the work ‘The Other Side,’ Goldin’s homage to her trans friends. People laugh, pose, kiss, play dress-up, sprawl across beds, sit in cars. Some images are captured seconds apart, one side of a blink to the other. I feel like I’m there. Photos repeat here from other slideshows. I remember them as if they’re my own memories. I’m here and elsewhere, in Nan’s world and mine.
Nan Goldin: ‘Picnic on the Esplanade,’ Boston, 1973, photo from the series ‘The Other Side’ // © Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist
At its center, ‘This Will Not End Well’ shows how directness helps us get to the messy complexity of lived experience. Goldin’s work doesn’t explain or mediate; there’s no guide for its emotional terrain. By refusing to soften life’s hard edges or package its joy, loss and defiance, her images create a kind of openness, allowing viewers to bring their own stories, their own associations, to meet hers. Goldin used the exhibition’s opening as her chance to confront Germany, holding a four-minute silence “in honour of the dead” before presenting the bare facts of the genocide in Gaza. As Goldin finished her speech, chants in solidarity with Palestine took over, concluding with “from the gallery to the street.” The moment was a continuation of Goldin’s work, showing us the world as it is, with space for reckoning.
Exhibition Info
Neue Nationalgalerie
Nan Goldin: ‘This Will Not End Well’
Exhibition: Nov. 23, 2024-Apr. 6, 2025
smb.museum
Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
