A showcase of the largest collection of slideshow-format photography ever presented in Europe
Titled “This Will Not End Well”, the exhibition dedicated to Nan Goldin will be on view at Hangar Bicocca from October 11 to February 15, 2026. The event highlights the artist’s ongoing engagement with reinterpreting her photographic body of work, a tendency also reflected in the autobiographical film she made in collaboration with David Armstrong, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” released in 1995. The show features the largest collection of slideshow-format photographs ever presented and, for the first time in Europe, includes Goldin’s two most recent projection works: You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), the latter inspired by Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, which drew large crowds this summer at Église Saint-Blaise in Arles as part of the renowned Rencontres de la Photographie festival.
Also on display is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency inspired by a song by Kurt Weill from Bertolt Brecht's "Threepenny Opera"
Also among the premieres is a sound installation created by the Soundwalk Collective. The exhibition opens with Goldin’s seminal work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022), first presented at New York’s Mudd Club in 1979, and inspired by a Kurt Weill song from Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera”. The Other Side (1992-2021) serves both as a historical portrait and a tribute to Goldin’s trans friends, featuring intimate shots taken between 1972 and 2010. Equally intimate and traumatic is Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls (2004-2022), a piece centered on her relationship with her sister and her suicide. For this, the towering 20-meter structure that originally housed it in Paris in 2004
has been reconstructed. Also dark and autobiographical are Memory Lost (2019-2021) and Sirens (2019- 2020) which delve into the themes of artificial paradises and addiction. A glimmer of light shines through in Fire Leap (2010-2022), an exploration of the world of childhood.
Stendhal Syndrome draws inspiration from Ovid's metamorphoses
The exhibition design is another highlight: a series of custom-built pavilions, each tailored to the work it houses, forming a kind of village. These were conceived by Hala Wardé, a longtime collaborator of Goldin. Despite its pessimistic title, the exhibition offers a compelling portrait of Goldin’s poetics, rooted in the inseparable link between art and life through the format of the “photo diary”, a thread also explored in the recent documentary film about her, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, directed by Laura Poitras and awarded at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. A title that could sum up her entire existence, here rendered in slideshow form.
Dark and autobiographical, Memory Lost and Sirens explore the themes of artificial paradises and addiction
