Life in Frames: The Wounded and Luminous World of Nan Goldin
There is something profoundly alive, and at the same time irreparably wounded, in Nan Goldin’s world. Entering the exhibition This Will Not End Well, presented at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, means crossing a threshold where personal memory becomes a universal language and the image turns into a total experience. This is not a simple retrospective, but a journey into the very substance of life, into its beauty and its cruelty, into its ability to endure even when everything seems to fall apart.
Goldin, who has always described her slideshows as true “films made of stills,” builds here an intimate, pulsating form of cinema where every image is a confession and every sound a breath. The pavilions designed by architect Hala Wardé, framing the different bodies of work, are not neutral spaces but living organisms; one moves in and out of rooms that seem to hold voices, ghosts, and desires. It is a village of memory, a living archive of the human condition.
Despite its title, This Will Not End Well is not a statement of pessimism but an ironic, even tender gesture toward life’s fragility. Goldin does not fear the end, she narrates it; she turns it into story, into rhythm, into light. In this exhibition, suffering and joy coexist, chase one another, blur together until they merge into a single, ceaseless pulse.
This is the secret of her gaze: the ability to show life not as a sequence of events but as an emotional continuum, where beauty never erases the wound, it illuminates it.
Hala Wardé’s Village: Architectures of Memory
The visual impact upon entering the Navate at Pirelli HangarBicocca is that of a small village suspended in darkness. The structures designed by Hala Wardé are not mere exhibition spaces, they are architectural bodies that breathe in rhythm with Nan Goldin’s images. Each pavilion holds a work like a vital organ, and together they form a living system, a village of memory, fragile yet powerful, where every sound and projection maps out a topography of intimacy.
Wardé, who has long collaborated with Goldin, does not create a stage set but an empathetic device. Her architectures are traversed by the light of projectors and by the sounds that filter from one space to another, as if life itself, with its echoes, its wounds, its confessions, were spreading through the air. It is a staging of vulnerability, where the boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, dissolve. Each room becomes a chamber of memory, a place where images turn into presences and presences into shadows.
The layout evokes an idea of emotional community, of coexistence between works and spectators. It does not follow a chronological order but unfolds as a spatial narrative, a flow of emotions moving through architecture. The visitor does not simply walk among the pavilions, they inhabit them, cross them, listen to them. Each space demands a different posture of body and gaze, at times one feels embraced, at others pushed away, almost overwhelmed.
In this sense, Wardé’s intervention is not just a frame but a critical interpretation of Goldin’s work, she translates it into architectural language, giving it physicality, weight, and breath. The artist and the architect meet on common ground, that of emotional experience. The resulting village is both refuge and labyrinth, collective memory and personal confession. It is the place where life, theirs and ours, continues to project itself, frame after frame.
Life as Montage: Bodies, Intimacy, Dependencies
Every image by Nan Goldin is a fragment of life, yet no life can be understood without the others. In her slideshows, faces, bodies, rooms, unmade beds, and incandescent parties follow one another like a collective stream of consciousness. It is a cinema of intimacy, where love and loss are the two magnetic poles that hold the world together.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the work that defined her language, is an atlas of vulnerability. From the 1980s to today, Goldin has kept re-editing and rewriting it, as if memory were never complete but a body that grows, gets wounded, heals, and begins again. The images, projected, animated by music, and immersed in darkness, convey the visceral rhythm of a generation that experienced freedom and soon after AIDS, that lived the night as home and addiction as fate. There is no judgment, no distance, only a rough tenderness, a compassion born from belonging. Goldin never observes from outside, she is inside every shot, part of the story she builds.
Alongside this work, The Other Side (1992–2021) is an act of love and remembrance toward her trans friends, portrayed with a delicacy that is both documentary and sacred. In those made-up faces and theatrical gestures there is no artifice, but an affirmation of identity. Goldin shows beauty as resistance, performance as truth. Every pose becomes a way of inhabiting one’s own body, of claiming the right to be seen and loved as one is.
The darker heart of her work beats in Memory Lost and Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, two pieces that speak of addiction and loss, but also of survival. In Memory Lost, the image becomes a claustrophobic vortex, a journey through a mind in withdrawal, where voice and music merge in a constant drift between clarity and delirium. In Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, loss becomes ritual: the pain for her sister Barbara’s suicide transforms into a visual liturgy that joins personal confession and the collective dimension of mourning. The great Cube of HangarBicocca turns into a secular chapel, a space of expiation and listening.
Goldin stages life as a montage of contradictions, eros and self-destruction, love and fear, dependence and freedom. Every image is an act of truth that seeks not redemption but presence. This is what makes her gaze so powerful, the ability to turn the personal into the universal, to tell the story of humanity starting from herself, with a sincerity that offers no comfort yet opens windows of light.
Myths and Abstractions: The Gaze Beyond Reality
In recent years, Nan Goldin’s gaze seems to have shifted from what is immediately visible to what vibrates beneath the surface of reality. After decades of intimacy, bodies, and confessions, her research opens to a new dimension, that of myth and abstraction. Yet this is not an escape from life, but a return to it, deeper and more essential.
With You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024), Goldin signs her first abstract work, a meditation on the eclipse as both a cosmic and symbolic event. According to an ancient myth, an eclipse is caused by animals devouring the sun, a primordial and violent gesture, yet a natural one, that becomes a metaphor for the cycles of death and rebirth. The images, less narrative and more evocative, flow like waves of light and shadow, accompanied by a soundtrack that seems to pulse with the rhythm of breath. It is as if Goldin, after portraying the raw matter of life, were now seeking its spiritual vibration, what remains when the figure disappears, when experience dissolves into pure visual energy.
In Stendhal Syndrome, also from 2024, the artist intertwines Ovid’s Metamorphoses with the faces of her friends. Myth and biography merge: Daphne, Narcissus, Echo, Orpheus become contemporary figures, embodied by real people, portrayed with the same intimacy of the 1980s yet immersed in a mythical time. Images of paintings and sculptures from museums around the world overlap with familiar faces, creating a dizzying dialogue between ancient and present, art and life. For Goldin, myth is not an escape from reality, but a way to recognize its eternity, what happens today has always already happened. Love, loss, transformation, guilt, all return, like light rekindling somewhere else.
In these more recent works, Goldin leaves behind the diaristic urgency to enter a more suspended, almost contemplative territory. Yet even here, beneath the surface of abstraction, the same visceral energy remains, the same empathy that has always run through her work. It is as if, after living inside the image for forty years, the artist were now exploring its invisible breath, that threshold where the eye closes and experience becomes myth.
The Voice of Sound and the Legacy of Nan Goldin
At the entrance to the exhibition, before the images even begin to appear, a breath can be heard. It is Bleeding (2025), the new sound installation by Soundwalk Collective, conceived as both the prelude and the heartbeat of the exhibition. The sound waves float through the air like invisible presences: noises, voices, fragments recorded during the previous stages of the show in Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Berlin, now reassembled into a continuous, organic composition. It is a sound that does not accompany the images but precedes them, prepares them, welcomes them, as if memory, before being seen, had to be heard.
The duo, composed of Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, has collaborated with Goldin for years, and their music has often acted as an emotional translation of her photography. In Bleeding, sound becomes blood flowing through Wardé’s village, a fluid that connects the pavilions and turns the space into a living, vibrating body. The installation does not narrate but evokes, creating a soundscape that expands and contracts like a memory in motion, a presence that never settles. Walking among the projections, the effect is that of a lucid dream: one feels that the images are breathing, that the sounds are their inner pulse.
And it is precisely in this fusion of image, sound, and space that Nan Goldin’s deepest legacy takes shape. Her work is not only photography, nor simply cinema, but an aesthetic form of life, a way of perceiving the world through empathy and vulnerability. From her early self-portraits and the friends of The Ballad to the abstract mythologies of her recent works, Goldin has always sought the same gesture: to turn experience into communion, to make memory a place that can be lived in. Her images look back at us as we look at them; they compel us to recognize ourselves, even in the parts we would rather not see.
This Will Not End Well is not a warning but a promise. It will not end well because it will never end. The images will continue to pulse, to change, to tell their stories. Life, after all, is not meant to be concluded but remembered, shared, relived. And it is in this movement, between wound and beauty, between voice and silence, that Nan Goldin’s art finds its most radical truth, that of a memory that never stops loving.
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