An icon of contemporary photography, Nan Goldin steps into the spotlight as a filmmaker. The Grand Palais presents the first retrospective in France of her videos and slide shows, which the artist describes as 'films composed of photos'. An intimate journey into the heart of her life, her friendships, her loves, and her struggles.
Nan Goldin (born in 1953 in Washington D.C.) is recognized as a major artist who revolutionized contemporary photography and the visual culture of our time. From 1979 to the present day, she has created numerous slide shows from the thousands of photographs she took of her daily life with loved ones, their intimacy, and family events. She crafts narratives based on her own experience, addressing themes such as childhood, gender, violence, and drug addiction. Raw and intimate, the stories she reveals take on the dimension of universal tales about love and loss. At the Grand Palais, the exhibition unfolds within pavilions designed by architect Hala Wardé. Each pavilion is conceived specifically for the work it houses; together, they form a village. This village extends to the Saint-Louis chapel at La Salpêtrière, where the installation created for this space in 2004 for the Festival d'Automne, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, is presented. The exhibition brings together six major works tracing fifty years of creation: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022), her masterpiece; The Other Side (1992-2021), a tribute to her trans community photographed between 1972 and 2010; Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004-2022), a testimony on family trauma and the taboo of suicide; Memory Lost (2019-2021), a claustrophobic journey through drug withdrawal; Sirens (2019-2020), a dive into the ecstasy of drugs; and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a work inspired by six myths from Ovid's Metamorphoses, exploring the condition described by Stendhal as fainting before the overwhelming beauty of art. If the exhibition title This Will Not End Well may seem dark and unsettling, it is also filled with irony and emotion. According to Fredrik Liew, it reflects "the unshakable joie de vivre that characterizes Nan Goldin." After Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Milan, the exhibition now takes over the Grand Palais and the Saint-Louis chapel at La Salpêtrière in Paris, offering a unique immersion into the intimate, moving, and deeply human universe of Nan Goldin.
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Source: paris.fr — photo: Nan Goldin