Nan Goldin: “This will not end well”, the great retrospective in Milan

NoIt won’t end well. This won’t end well.
After all, why should he? We are cruel and cynical, poisonous beings who destroy the planet they live on and kill their own kind without any remorse.

No, this won’t end well. It is the dramatic and ironic title of the great retrospective dedicated to Nan Goldin toHangar Bicocca in Milan.
In the Navate space, a village of eight architectural structures – circular and square, designed by the architect Hala Wardé – hosts the same number of chapters of the American artist’s work. We went to the press preview, an opportunity to see the exhibition and meet the artist.

Crossing the large space of the Hangar in almost total darkness, the sound, composed for this occasion, is the only clue that guides us to her, Nan Goldin welcomes us with her team.
Sitting in the darkness we wait for the conference to begin.
Instead she doesn’t speak. She thanks everyone, curators, sound designers, producers and architects and invites us to see the screening.

Gaza, Nan Goldin’s latest work

In the silence of the voice it is the images and sounds that speak.
The photographs and videos of Gaza flow by, taken from YouTube and social media, edited in sequence, nailing us humans to the responsibility of what happened.
They are simple images, imprecise like existence.
There is the before and after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. There is joy and desperation, houses and rubble, life and death.
At the end of the screening, the artist is there, in front of us, sitting in semi-darkness.
We could, we should, ask her questions, but no one dares.
After Gaza, nothing seems to make sense.

How was this possible?

The artist remains in the chair for a few minutes, then leaves us with a confession: “For the last two years I have lived thinking only of what you have just seen.” And he adds: “How was it possible? The media are seriously guilty. The world saw it and didn’t stop it. Let’s not look the other way. You journalists are important, you have great responsibilities.”
We, sitting in that darkness, eyes and hearts invaded by pain, know it, yet we remain crushed by the sense of helplessness.
There is nothing else to add. Nobody will ask questions.
The press conference became a political manifesto.
The same video was presented in a similar form last summer during i Rencontres de la Photographie de Arles. On that occasion, the audience at the Ancient Theater applauded, but also criticized Goldin for not mentioning the hostages killed or taken prisoner by Hamas.

Nan Goldin is an artist, an activist, a militant of life. Courageous and rebellious, she uses photography to tell about herself and the world around her. He shuns metaphor and paradigm, mocks the stereotype. He offers his authenticity, all his work is autobiographical, even when the protagonists are not friends or relatives, it is his idea of ​​the world that becomes a vision, a revelation of his own inner universe. His imagery is the reflection of his personal human story.

His entire work is an existential album

His simple, domestic photographs, like ours, therefore break down the distance between his work and us who observe it. Places and people, memories, notes, a gigantic existential album in which the image is the space of the meeting between us and her. And music, which has always been the great protagonist of his work, makes this installation deeply immersive.
The body is the protagonist of every composition, of flesh or marble, wounded, bruised, coarse and disheveled, innocent and delicate like that of children or free and wild like that of animals, it speaks, suffers, rejoices. The artist exposes it in its inevitable subjectivity, so friends and family, strangers or intimates, are the figures of the photographic fresco. Noisy and crowded, Goldin’s images speak of life as it is, of us and the multitudes we contain, which is why they are powerful and subversive. They declare diversity, embrace fragility.

It won’t end well,This won’t end well, it is a painful, innocent and courageous, sincere and profound work. It shows scars, illness and death, yet praises life. After all, the artist herself is the result of many rebirths. From one pavilion to another, we are involved in a vortex of images and music where everything lights up, takes on light and colour, to the rhythm of the wonderful soundtracks, regenerates into lived life and becomes empathy. It is a continuous work even for those who do not imagine the torment of his journey and do not know his passion for photography, for those who do not know of those cursed years in which we wanted everything immediately, but we did not know how much good and evil that everything contained.

Activist and artist

Nan Goldin, activist, artist, subversive, photographer, has transferred her human story and that of her tribe from the private to the public. From his sister’s suicide, to the violence of the stereotypes of the American middle class, through substance addiction, private violence, to the pain of the loss of many friends who died of AIDS and heroin, children of the generation mowed down by history. Photography has become his voice, a cry against the dominant culture, a declaration of love for others, a hymn to fragility. All of his work is dedicated to relationships, to bonds that are not broken even with death.

Nan Goldin is cinematic, documentary, autobiographical

As we close the circle of the village, reflecting on Nan Goldin’s photography – cinematic, documentary, autobiographical, every definition seems reductive – on the strength of the message and the ability to affirm the language, going beyond the boundaries of the photographic field to be recognized as a contemporary artist, it would be reductive to analyze its formal aspect, while it is more natural let yourself be led by his rough and intimate gaze which intelligently never falls into melodrama and existential epic, but flows fearlessly along the exposed nerve of the human soul.

And this is the best of the attitudes to which we can abandon ourselves to breathe the art of Nan Goldin, her poetics, infinite and poignant, disarmed and disarming, by which we can be enveloped and moved.

The exhibition

We won’t tell you about the exhibition, but the time you spend there will be worth it.
Nan Goldin’s world is complex, a whirlwind of faces and stories that reach the viewer distilled from music.
Organized by the Moderna Museet in collaboration with Pirelli HangarBicocca, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and Grand Palais Rmn in Paris, the exhibition is organized in independent structures, cabins that form a village. Within each of them a chapter of the work takes place: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022) a deeply personal story, born from the artist’s experiences in Boston, New York, Berlin and other cities in the late 70s and 80s, composed of more than 700 intimate and poignant instant portraits; The Other Side (1992-2021)historical portrait, homage to trans friends through intimate and private shots taken between 1972 and 2010; Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004-2022)testimony on family trauma and suicide; Fire Leap (2010-2022)foray into the world of childhood; Memory Lost (2019-2021)claustrophobic trip in drug withdrawal; Sirens (2019-2020)journey into drug ecstasy; You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024), Goldin’s first abstract work, inspired by an ancient myth that an eclipse is caused by animals stealing the sun, is a poetic meditation on life, death, and the natural cycles that connect all living things. Stendhal Syndrome (2024), instead is based on six myths taken from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” that come to life through portraits of Goldin’s friends in a visual dialogue across time, and in which the artist’s personal experience is intertwined with his shots of paintings and sculptures from museums around the world.

Two hours minimum, four would be better

Consider it a journey, if you want to get to the end quickly, it will take two hours, but if you accept the time it takes, four hours will allow you to experience it completely.

The Exhibition

Nan Goldin: “This won’t end well”
Until 15.02.2026
Milan, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Via Chiese, 2, 20126 Milan MI