Nan Goldin – This Will Not End Well at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

11.10.2025 – 15.02.2026

By Anna Zimm & Sophie Zimm

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There aren’t many exhibitions that would make me travel to another city, but in mid-October Nan Goldin’s This Will Not End Well opened at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan—an exhibition my sister Sophie and I travelled to see. The following review was written in dialogue with her and it reflects many of our shared observations and thoughts.

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This Will Not End Well is the first major exhibition showcasing Nan Goldin’s work as a filmmaker and multimedia artist. It originally debuted in 2022 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, traveled to Amsterdam and then to Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Goldin’s opening speech there has been echoing in my memory. “Does it make you feel uncomfortable?” she asked, referring to the thousands of deaths in Gaza. Since then, I would like to ask so many people this question as well, especially in the photo world. As personal as Goldin’s work is, it can never be separated from her activities as an activist.

The Milan spin-off exhibition, curated by Roberta Tenconi and Lucia Aspesi, features eight slideshows, each of them displayed in a dedicated pavilion, created by the architect Hala Wardé in close collaboration with Goldin. The Bicocca hangar was last commercially used for building trains, and it is a monumental space which is so powerful and dark that you first have to get used to its size. Each pavilion is specially designed in aspects of form, lighting and interior layout in relation to the work shown inside. The eight slideshows and video installations range from 15 to 42 minutes in length. Goldin already started presenting her work in slideshow form in clubs and underground cinemas as early as 1980. There is no form of presentation that suits her work better, as it conveys the vividness of life—fast paced and ever changing. As Goldin has said, “My slideshows are films made up of stills.”

Nan Goldin, Still from Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, 2004–2022. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy Gagosian

We started with the longest of the exhibited slideshows, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her best known work. Accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack, the slideshow comprises nearly 700 portraits of Goldin’s inner circle of friends, lovers and acquaintances, capturing her life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Berlin and London from the 1970s to the 1990s. The Ballad is fast-paced; life appears bold and rebellious. At the same time, a lot of the photographs capture private moments and feelings. Sitting in the dark with strangers while looking at such an intimate sequence of photographs has a quality of its own. It was completely quiet in the audience and it felt like a collective yet intimate experience.

Nan Goldin, Brian and Nan in Kimono, 1983. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy Gagosian

My sister and I would tap each other when we particularly liked a picture. Sometimes I would have liked to press pause because I liked an image so much, but it is precisely this fleetingness that makes Goldin’s work so authentic. Like the title of Laura Poitras’ documentary about Goldin, All the beauty and the bloodshed, joy is often not so far from pain; solitude can follow laughter. We know that many of the people shown are no longer alive, and isn’t loss Goldin’s overriding theme? In the credits, she dedicates The Ballad to the people of Gaza and Lebanon, and reading this short line is at first shocking, because one cannot help but think of the images of the many dead over the past years.

The largest installation is Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, 2004-2022, a deeply personal work dedicated to the life of Goldin’s older sister Barbara Holly Goldin. Barbara, who was institutionalized as a teenager, died by suicide at the age of eighteen. The loss was a pivotal moment in Goldin’s life, driving her to reject and escape her suburban American life at the time. The piece was originally conceived in 2004 for the chapel of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris, and the monumental 20-meter-high tryptic video screens placed in front of the grandstand also gave the installation in the hangar a sacred and powerful impression.

Nan Goldin, “This Will Not End Well”. Exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio

The installation starts with the myth of Saint Barbara and tells the story of the early Christian martyr as a three-channel projection that echoes the triptych format of classical religious painting. The second chapter recounts Barbara’s life through family photos and documents, narrated by Goldin herself. Clinical, harsh accounts of Barbara’s condition by institutions are placed in stark contrast to Goldin’s tender stories about her sister. Goldin recounts how Barbara would babysit her and play the “moon serenade” on the piano. Barbara was smiling in nearly all of the projected photographs, knowing how much she struggled made this happiness painful to watch. In the last part of the installation we see traces of Goldin’s search for—and discovery of—a community of fellow outsiders. She reveals her experiences with addiction, confinement and self-harm, showing that from grief and suffering comes growth and transformation.

The soundtrack featured songs by Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Eartha Kitt, and Jefferson Airplane, all of them already blisteringly emotional enough, and then culminating with the Song to the Siren by The Mortal Coil. “Oh, my heart, Oh, my heart shies from the sorrow. Well, I’m as puzzled as the newborn child. I′m as riddled as the tide. Should I stand amid the breakers? Or should I lie with death my bride?”.

In Fire Leap, 2010-2022, Goldin devotes herself to the children of her friends and acquaintances. Beginning with images of pregnant women, giving birth, and breastfeeding, Goldin photographed kids who are truly themselves. We see her fascination with their carefree attitude and freedom, how they interact and relate to each other without the inhibitions and inauthentic behavior of adults.

The other slideshows, including Memory Lost, Sirens, The Other Side, Stendhal Syndrome, and You Never Did Anything Wrong, were compiled around themes like sisterhood and childhood, and referenced Greek mythology. Goldin’s slideshows seize the viewer’s full attention, their emotional weight, and reflections on family, friendship, love, pain, joy, and grief, echoing long after viewing. Goldin’s world is one of radical empathy. “It’s about trying to feel what another person is feeling,” she says. She teaches us that there is something greater than grief: Shared empathy and the opposite of indifference. Experiencing her work together with others gives us comfort amidst sadness.

In Milan, Goldin unveiled an additional, surprise work. Simply titled Gaza, this harrowing silent film layers videos from social media capturing Gaza before and during the devastation of war. “The last two years of my life, I’ve been watching this and not being able to stop it.” Goldin said at the press conference, referencing the war in Gaza. “That makes people sick. I just want to say, don’t look away.”

Goldin makes us do exactly as she says. Don’t look away! Goldin has documented issues outside of the mainstream from a deeply personal perspective, from transgender people, AIDS patients, the opioid crisis, or suicide and illness. That she has more recently been one of the loudest voices in the photo scene to advocate for Palestinians is as expected as it is touching.

Everything about Goldin is both private and political. Everything is intimate and yet universally relatable. Goldin’s greatness lies in her ability to speak to something in all of us through deeply personal works. None of her slideshows appear to be overly constructed or curated. Rather, the sequence of the photos and music show Goldin’s innate sensitivity and intuition for storytelling and composition. As a viewer of her work, one never feels that she is trying to make a particular point, but rather that she lets us into her own world and her relationships. There is a powerful and life-affirming message at the heart of it about how community can help you find a way through life, even in the darkest times.

This Will Not End Well is running at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until 15 February 2025. Accompanying the retrospective Steidl published a comprehensive catalogue, 3rd edition 2025.