The most comprehensive showing of Nan Goldin’s photographs and films is intense and emotional

Formerly a tyre factory, Pirelli HangarBicocca’s vast industrial interior might seem an unlikely setting for the intimate, intensely personal, largely photographic work of Nan Goldin. Yet, as you enter, the space’s dimness and scale create a dramatic and carefully curated build-up of intensity, and an almost heightened sense of devotion to the most comprehensive survey of Goldin’s moving-image work ever staged.

At first, the hangar feels almost empty, save for a small, single, suspended control panel with lights and buttons projecting from its surface, hanging under a cone of light. As visitors move through the shadowed expanse, a constellation of small, purpose-built pavilions emerges, each one an autonomous screening room dedicated to one of Goldin’s films. 'I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker,' she once said, rejecting the notion of her photographs as static. 'My slideshows are films made up of stills.'

The show, ‘This Will Not End Well’ (until 2 February 2026) brings together six major films and several new commissions, and asserts Goldin as one of the most vital artists of our time. Her work bears witness to the Aids crisis in New York, documents political fervour against the Sackler family, demonstrates solidarity with Palestinians under siege, and insists on recognising animals as sentient beings, all marking her as not only a profound artist but a deeply human chronicler of our world.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022) is arguably Goldin’s most defining work, and still lands with intense emotional charge. When Goldin began photographing her friends and lovers in downtown New York in the late 1970s, she was documenting a world that would soon tear through her community of artists, drag performers, and musicians, erasing people faster than film could preserve them. What makes The Ballad so devastating is that it isn’t reportage, and Goldin never pointed her camera lens at hospitals or protests; rather, she documented the private aftermath, and the absent spaces of former lives. Her images became a deeply emotional diary, and a refusal to let her friends vanish into anonymity. In The Other Side (1992-2021), the mood softens to her portraits devoted to drag queens and trans women, whom Goldin recognised as her chosen family. Goldin’s gaze is never voyeuristic, and her camera lens documents in an empathetic way. It is clear that she cares deeply for her subject matter.

The tone darkens again with Memory Lost (2019-2021), a suffocating immersion into the darkness of drug addiction and relapse, which ends with Gabor Maté, a philosopher, psychiatrist, and writer, saying that it’s only human to do drugs: ‘totally sane, totally desirable, totally human’. Watching that film after Sirens (2019-2020) with an accompanying soundtrack by Mica Levi, it channels the ecstatic hallucination of intoxication. Together, they document a time when Goldin spiralled into an opioid addiction following an OxyContin prescription after a wrist injury in 2010. Her recovery brought with it a rage at a system that had commodified pain, and at the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical empire profited from the crisis that nearly killed her. In response, she founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2017, an activist collective of artists, addicts, and museum workers determined to hold the Sacklers accountable.

Their protests and 'die-ins' staged inside The Met, the Guggenheim, the V&A, the Louvre, saw protesters scatter pill bottles into the water, while chanting ‘Sacklers lie, people die.’ The protestors had some of their desires answered, as the Tate, The Met, the Guggenheim, and the Louvre all severed ties with the Sacklers, and in 2019, the Louvre became the first major museum to physically erase the Sackler name from its walls. While the official reason given by the museum was that the legal time period for displaying the name of a donor had elapsed, the move was perceived as a victory that few artists could have imagined. This shows the way Goldin works: her approach is almost poetic, headstrong and so convincing, that to refuse her requests would be questionable. Her activism was excellently documented in Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), which won the Golden Lion at Venice. The film captures Goldin’s life and way of working, her work spanning the Aids crisis to the opioid epidemic, from personal trauma to public accountability. 'I wanted them to feel my anger,' she says in the film. 'I wanted museums to know whose money they were taking.'

The exhibition’s final rooms mark an evolution in Goldin’s gaze, showcasing two of her more recent works. You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024) expand her empathy beyond the human, as animals from stray dogs to birds and insects are each treated with the same tenderness as her human subjects. In Stendhal Syndrome, mythological bodies from Ovid’s Metamorphoses blend with her portraits and archival images. These new works suggest a kind of non-hierarchical cosmology, one in which all living things are vulnerable and should be treated the same.

At the far end of the hangar, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004-2022) occupies a raised platform, its three screens narrating the suicide of Goldin’s sister Barbara. Below them are two wax figures, one of a young girl lying in a bed, with a bedside lamp and open bedside cabinet, its table topped with scattered pill boxes, and another of a man, standing and overlooking her on a raised platform. It’s one of her most emotionally wrenching works, and a testament to how trauma can generate empathy, and how art can transmute grief into solidarity.

In the main exhibition room, projected onto one of the museum walls, is a new work of recorded social media footage documenting the genocide in Gaza: Israeli bombings of hospitals, schools and homes, the killing of journalists and innocent civilians, most of them children. It's heart-wrenching and harrowing, but it's a documentation of the brutality we’ve been seeing online since 7 October 2023.

There is no narration to her latest work, which she titles Gaza (2025). 'I could talk about elegant things,' she said at the press conference to the opening of the exhibition at Pirelli in October 2025, 'but really, Gaza is where my mind has been for the past two years.' Goldin is always accompanied by a bodyguard, also present at the opening.

'The Western media has been so complicit in their violence and in their distortion of the facts,' she continued, 'and now there is a supposed ceasefire and everyone will report on that so everyone is looking away from Gaza, and meanwhile Palestinians are continuing to be bombed daily. Looking at this fictional peace treaty that does not bode well for the future of the Palestinian people, but bodes well for the future of Donald Trump… I just want to say, don't look away; this should never have happened. The world could see it, but never stopped it. What does that say about humanity going forward?'

Goldin’s refusal to separate her art from her politics recalls an earlier generation of artists for whom art was inseparable from resistance. You might think of David Wojnarowicz, whose work raged against government indifference during the Aids crisis; Hans Haacke, who exposed museum funding from Apartheid-backed corporations; or Martha Rosler, who critiqued war through photo collages. Goldin’s activism stands in that lineage, but she brings something rare to it, and this is her vulnerability. Her politics are not ideological abstractions; they come from her own lived experience of addiction, loss, and survival.

What makes Goldin so extraordinary is that she reminds us of something the contemporary art world has almost forgotten: that the artist’s role is not only to make interesting, engaging and contemplative things, but to make us see. To see pain, power, love, violence, and situate our own place within them. In the last decade, many artists have become increasingly careful about what they say and show, as the global art market has grown into a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem of fairs, collectors, sponsors, and brand partnerships. Museums depend on private funding, and artists rely on institutions to exhibit and sell their work. Against this backdrop, political expression has become risky, especially when it challenges the very patrons who sustain the system. The result is a climate of fear and self-censorship: an art world that prizes radical aesthetics, but avoids radical politics.

Goldin disrupts that silence; she is one of the few living artists whose work is not only political in content but political in consequence. Her founding of P.A.I.N. actively changed policy, forcing museums to confront the origins of their wealth, and in doing so, exposed how cultural institutions often launder corporate or political power through art. Goldin’s artistic power lies in how she connects the personal to the systemic. Her empathy – for the trans community, for queer lovers, for animals, for addicts, for civilians in Gaza – is not merely sentimental; it is political, as she insists on the dignity of every life many governments would prefer to discard. And to insist and see so clearly is one of the most political acts there is.

Nan Goldin 'This Will Not End Well' at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until 15 February 2026

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