This Will Not End Well

Pirelli HangarBicocca presents This Will Not End Well, the first retrospective dedicated to Nan Goldin as a filmmaker, organized by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in collaboration with leading international institutions. The exhibition brings together the largest corpus of the artist’s slideshows ever shown, includes a newly commissioned sound installation, and for the first time in Europe in a museum context, presents her two most recent slideshows.

Conceived as a village of pavilions designed by architect Hala Wardé, the exhibition reflects Goldin’s vision of her slideshows as films composed of frames. The title, seemingly dark, carries a vital irony that embodies her unshakable joie de vivre. The exhibition includes seminal works such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, an intimate and generational portrait; The Other Side, a historical tribute to the trans community; Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, a testimony to family trauma; Fire Leap, dedicated to childhood; and Memory Lost and Sirens, exploring the experience of addiction.

In Milan, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls is installed in the Cube in a format faithful to the original, including sculptural elements. The exhibition also presents two recent slideshows: You Never Did Anything Wrong, an abstract meditation on life’s cycles, and Stendhal Syndrome, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The experience begins with Bleeding, a sound installation by Soundwalk Collective, guiding visitors into Goldin’s visual and poetic world.

A central figure in contemporary art, Nan Goldin has revolutionized photographic and audiovisual language through a deeply autobiographical practice, capable of conveying intimacy, desire, loss, and marginality, influencing generations of artists and contemporary visual culture.