Nan Goldin — This Will Not End Well

Nan Goldin's slideshows and films in book form, published with Moderna Museet, Stockholm, for the retrospective of the same name that the museum organised.

Goldin has always wanted to make films, and thinks of her slideshows as films composed of stills. In the course of fifty years she has built about a dozen of them from thousands of photographs, adding film footage, voices and archive material over time, and she goes on re-editing them. The exhibition showed six, among them The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Sisters, Saints and Sibyls, about her older sister Barbara, who took her own life at eighteen, and Memory Lost, about drug withdrawal, each in its own building designed by the architect Hala Wardé. It then travelled to Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan and Paris.

The book follows the way the works are projected: every image is printed at one size on a black ground, in the order it takes in the original piece. Teresa Hahr and Fredrik Liew edited it. Most of its 20 texts were newly commissioned by Goldin, with writing by Vince Aletti, Eileen Myles, Patrick Radden Keefe, Lucy Sante and Roni Horn among others, and there is an interview by Andrea Lissoni.

Steidl and Moderna Museet, 2022. 216 pages, clothbound hardcover, 24.5 x 26 cm.