Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well

An icon of contemporary photography, Nan Goldin is presenting herself as a filmmaker. The Grand Palais will present, on 18 March 2026 at 9:00 AM, the first retrospective in France of her videos and slideshows, which the artist describes as "films made of photographs." It is an intimate journey into the heart of her life, her friendships, her loves, and her struggles. Nan Goldin (born 1953, Washington D.C.) is recognized as a major artist who has revolutionized contemporary photography and the visual culture of our time. From 1979 to the present, she has created numerous slideshows from the thousands of photographs she took of her daily life with those close to her, of their intimacy and of family events. She constructs narratives from her own experience and addresses subjects including childhood, gender, violence, and drug dependence. Raw and intimate, the stories she presents take on the quality of tales about love and loss.

At the Grand Palais, the exhibition unfolds in pavilions designed by architect Hala Wardé. Each pavilion is conceived for the work it houses; together they form a village. This ensemble extends to the Saint-Louis Chapel at La Salpêtrière, where the installation created for that space in 2004 as part of the Festival d'Automne, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, is on view.

The exhibition brings together six major works that trace fifty years of creation: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022); The Other Side (1992–2021), a tribute to her transgender circle photographed between 1972 and 2010; Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), a testimony to family trauma and the taboo of suicide; Memory Lost (2019–2021), a claustrophobic journey through drug withdrawal; Sirens (2019–2020), an immersion in the ecstasy of drug use; and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a work inspired by six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that explores the condition described by Stendhal as a loss of consciousness in the face of art’s beauty.

While the exhibition title This Will Not End Well may sound dark and unsettling, it is also full of irony and emotion. According to Fredrik Liew, it reflects "the unshakable zest for life that characterizes Nan Goldin." After stops in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin and Milan, the exhibition takes up residence at the Grand Palais and the Saint-Louis Chapel at La Salpêtrière in Paris for an immersion in Nan Goldin’s world.