This is London Magazine September Edition 2026 - Flipbook - Page 23
YOU NEVER DID ANYTHING WRONG
Exciting news for photography fans.
From 24 November, the Hayward Gallery
will host a major solo exhibition by
acclaimed American artist and activist
Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything
Wrong. Rounding off the Southbank
Centre's 75th anniversary year, it marks
Goldin's first institutional exhibition in
the UK since 2002.
Over the past five decades, Nan
Goldin has documented personal
relationships, addiction and queer
communities, forming an autobiography
she calls ‘a record of my life that no one
can revise’. Her unflinching images have
transformed photography by closing the
distance between the observer and the
observed, capturing the rawness of the
artist’s own life and that of her people.
Comprising deeply intimate photographs
and slideshows, her stories embrace the
complexity of life, standing as universal
tales of love and loss.
Since the 1970s, Goldin’s work has
explored notions of gender and
definitions of normality. By documenting
her life and the lives of the friends who
surround her, Goldin gives a voice and
visibility to her communities, especially
the bohemian LGBT communities which
were deeply impacted by the devastating
HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
These images of her ‘extended family’
became the subject of her seminal slide
show and first book The Ballad of Sexual
Dependency. Her retrospective This Will
Not End Well, the first exhibition
dedicated to her work as a filmmaker, is
currently travelling through Europe.
Rachel Thomas, Roden Chief Curator,
says: ‘While UK audiences may have
seen glimpses of Nan’s story, this major
exhibition will offer a long overdue
institutional-scale immersion into the
world of a true revolutionary. The
Hayward’s show extends an invitation to
experience work that is essential for
understanding the interconnectedness of
personal experience and political action,
revealing the human condition in all of
its beauty and fragility.’
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Nan Goldin, Electric Gaja, Paris, 2010
13 - 24 OCT 2026
© Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian
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