The retrospective This Will Not End Well, presented at the Grand Palais in Paris until June 21, transforms fifty years of images by the American bisexual photographer into an immersive experience.
The American photographer Nan Goldin, 72, known for documenting, since the 1970s, the LGBTIQ+ scenes of Boston and New York, invites herself to the Grand Palais until June 21 with a multisensory retrospective titled This Will Not End Well. This exhibition, conceived from her slideshows and videos, unfolds fifty years of creation across six sections.
Nan Goldin rose to prominence with “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” In this series born in late-1970s New York and presented in the Paris exhibition, she turns photographs of her daily life into a narrative slideshow accompanied by music. She stages her community, the artistic queer circle surrounding her, mainly composed of her lovers and friends, notably drag queens whom she magnifies through her lens. By recounting her loves, excesses, addiction, revelry, violence and the loss linked to the AIDS crisis, she turns her personal memories into a collective archive.
According to Fredrik Liew, director of exhibitions and collections at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where This Will Not End Well originated in 2022 before moving to Amsterdam, Berlin and Milan, Nan Goldin has “never really wanted to be a photographer. She wanted to be a filmmaker”. An aspiration that informs her work, which does not consist of a succession of autonomous snapshots, but of editing, rhythm, and storytelling.” She had long hoped for a project like this affirming the cinematic character of her photos”, he tells us on the occasion of the retrospective’s opening.
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Sophie Brennan