By Giulia Piceni. Cover image: Nan Goldin. This Will Not End Well. Exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Courtesy: The Artist, Gagosian and Pirelli HangarBicocca. Photo: Agostino Osio.
For those who did “choose a life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television” Nan Goldin’s life, those shards of experience imprinted on photographic film, may appear bizarre, alternative or even marginal. To start narrating her most recent retrospective This Will Not End Well at Pirelli HangarBicocca, focused exclusively on filmographic material, it feels urgent to focus paradoxically on the installation that closes the exhibition.
Inside Nan Goldin’s This Will Not End Well at Hangar Bicocca
After crossing the navate in near darkness, a sombreness that draws the viewer into the nightlife scenes Goldin herself documented, one encounters an architecture of pavilions: a small city of despair within the enclosed space of the hangar. Each one was designed by architect Hala Wardé and each one reflects the filmic works it contains: some recall psychotic spirals while others are marked by red drapery suspended between the atmosphere of a brothel and the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks. The entire display is illuminated by differently-colored neon lights, the same lights that followed Goldin and her camera for decades.
Outside the towering final space Cube, a concise caption anticipates what lies ahead. The tripartite title mirrors the three-screen composition of the 34-minute film Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022). To access the film one must ascend two symmetrical staircases that lead to a raised platform approximately twenty metres above the ground. This curatorial choice recreates the architecture of the site where the work was first presented, La Chapelle de la Salpêtrière in Paris in 2004. An installation inside the chapel of a hospital is certainly no coincidence: as a matter of fact, the central figure of the work, Barbara, Goldin’s sister, had been institutionalised at the age of fourteen in a psychiatric hospital because she was considered too rebellious.
«Oh father, tell me, are you weeping? / Your face seems wet to touch / Oh, then I’m so sorry, father / I never thought I hurt you so much»
Why Nan Goldin’s Sisters, Saints, Sibyls Is Her Most Personal and Immersive Installation
Once on the viewing platform, visitors are immediately struck by a vertigo that is both sudden and unmistakable. Eyes accustomed to the darkness meet the iridescent glow of the screens slicing through the air, capturing the gaze. The effect intensifies when looking downward, where two sculptures emerge. In one, Nan Goldin appears as an elderly woman, lying nude in a bed but covered to the shoulders, staring at the ceiling. Strikingly, the earliest version of the installation in 2004 featured the same composition, only with a young Goldin: snow-white sheets and nightgown, her unruly curls straightened and tied back, resting softly on the pillow, her eyes glassy as they gazed upward. The Pirelli HangarBicocca installation mirrors this pose, but the figure now bears the traces of a life of excess—a life Barbara might have shared, had she lived. Nearby, in a rigid and threatening posture, hangs the nude torso of Goldin’s father. A stain on his chest, likely blood, marks him as the despot who misread Barbara’s hunger for life as mental illness and suppressed her youthful rebellion. In trying to protect her, he became her executioner.
The visual narrative of the installation unfolds across three screens, sometimes in synchrony and sometimes in staggered rhythms. Each screen follows its own trajectory in order to recount Barbara’s story. The images are interwoven with songs mainly by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and by Leonard Cohen, their lyrics having been picked with precision in order to trace the arc of Barbara’s life. The installation opens by drawing a parallel between Barbara Goldin and Saint Barbara.
«It seems so long ago / Nancy was alone / Looking at the late, late show / Through a semi-precious stone / In the House of Honesty / Her father was on trial / In the House of Mystery / There was no one at all […] It seems so long ago / Nancy was alone / A forty five beside her head / An open telephone / We told her she was beautiful / We told her she was free / But none of us would meet her in / The House of Mystery»
Nan Goldin Explores Saint Barbara: Tower Imprisonment and Miraculous Survival
According to hagiographic tradition, Barbara was the daughter of Dioscorus, a pagan. Fearing the world beyond and enamored by her beauty, he locked her in a tower. Noticing the plans had only two windows—one facing north, one south—Barbara ordered a third to be added in honor of the Trinity. Before entering, she immersed herself three times in a nearby pool and baptized herself. When Dioscorus discovered her new faith, he tried to kill her. Miraculously, she escaped, though he captured her again and dragged her before a prefect. Barbara refused to renounce her belief and endured repeated torture, her wounds healing each time. Ultimately, Dioscorus led her to a mountain top and decapitated her; upon descending, he was struck by lightning as divine punishment.
«That’s a funeral in the mirror and it’s stopping at your face […] Once there was a path and a girl with chestnut hair / And you passed the summers picking all of the berries that grew there / There were times she was a woman, oh, there were times she was just a child / And you held her in the shadows where the raspberries grow wild / And you climbed the twilight mountains and you sang about the view / And everywhere that you wandered, love seemed to go along with you / That’s a hard one to remember, yes, it makes you clench your fist / And then the veins stand out like highways all along your wrist»
Nan Goldin on Barbara Goldin: Her Sister’s Tragic Life and Survival
Barbara Goldin had been confined to a psychiatric hospital because she was considered too free. In her local cinema, she had casual sex with boys her age and older men and she had fallen secretly in love with a black boy, something her bourgeois family would not tolerate. Medications and treatments transformed her and hollowed her out. In a crescendo of tragedy she left the hospital one morning with a suitcase in her hand and a piece of paper with the address of the local employment office. She walked to the station and lay on the tracks, waiting for the upcoming train to end her life.
«I left my house without my coat / Something my nurse would not have allowed / And I took the small roads out of town / And I passed a cow and the cow was brown / And my pajamas clung to me like a shroud / Like a shroud / Like a shroud / Like a shroud»
As shown by the images that pass on the screens, retracing her sister’s story brought Nan Goldin back to the sites of the tragedy from railway tracks to psychiatric wards and back to the life she built afterwards. It reveals her way of suppressing constant pain and the buried belief that she was living on borrowed time. She had been told she too would die at eighteen. At fourteen she ran away, perhaps an attempt to escape that prophecy, seeking another form of family which she found among the drag queens of Boston. Her own life led her eventually into psychiatric hospitals and she documented that experience in a series of stark photographs. In them her arm appears almost necrotic, marked by dark excrescences caused by self harming with cigarette butts.
«I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel I focus on the pain / The only thing that’s real / The needle tears a hole / The old familiar sting / Try to kill it all away / But I remember everything»
The True Meaning of Nan Goldin’s This Will Not End Well: A Tribute to Barbara
What strikes the viewer most is how Nan Goldin, after organizing her exhibition into distinct architectural sections, seems to construct another structure of equal magnitude—a tribute, an altar for her sister. Barbara’s tragedy follows her like a restless ghost, a reminder that she must live twice as intensely, claiming a life large enough for two to honor the one Barbara was denied.
It feels as if Goldin is speaking directly to her sister through every frame: “I have done all of this for you. Every photograph, every night of excess, every pill, every cigarette, every moment I thought life was possible again—I have lived what you could not. I have carried the weight that crushed you, transforming our shared past into images and light so your name would never vanish.”
The installation becomes an act of restitution, a way to return to Barbara what was taken and to show that her life did not disappear on those tracks—it continued to burn within Nan, shaping who she became. The deeper purpose behind a life of excess slowly reveals itself.
