From Berlin to Milan, a Retrospective Exploring Life, Trauma, and Activism
“Since October 7th, I’ve found it hard to breathe. The last year has been Palestine and Lebanon for me. I feel the catastrophe in my body, but it’s not in this show.” With these words, American photographer Nan Goldin opened her retrospective in Berlin This will not end well, hosted by the Neue Nationalgalerie between November 2024 and April 2025. The same exhibition has now migrated to Milan, at Hangar Bicocca, and, inaugurated on October 11th, will be open to visitors until February 15th 2026. The speech she gave in Berlin was powerful and revealing of the times we live in, a time when taking a stand can come at a high price, even in the world of contemporary art.
Born in Washington in 1953 and raised in a Jewish family marked by trauma and hardships, Goldin turned her own life into the subject of a deeply expressive visual language. For her, photography became an act of survival, a way to confront the challenges she faced by capturing her daily life in a raw, unfiltered manner. Goldin began to document her community of friends, lovers, artists, and drug addicts, and from that experience emerged her most celebrated work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986): a sort of visual diary composed of hundreds of photos able to narrate the controversies experienced personally, but, at the same time, shared by an entire generation, that of the ’70s and ’80s, of which Goldin has skillfully outlined an evocative portrait. And precisely for this reason, her photographs have thus become authentic icons of an era.
Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin artist-activist
Nan Goldin is not only a radical artist: her being bold and without filters translates into her ability to expose herself and to do activism, using her art as a tool of political and social engagement. In the 1980s, she was among the first to document the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, portraying friends and lovers affected by the virus, in an era when the subject was still surrounded by stigma and fear. Later, she denounced the inequalities in the art world, often dominated by male elites and private capital. In 2017, she founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an organization created to denounce the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, accused of having fueled the opioid crisis in the United States with OxyContin. Goldin, who had personally experienced drug dependence, brought her protest inside museums, organizing actions of artistic disobedience at the Guggenheim in New York, the Louvre, and again at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, thus demonstrating that art can be a political space, a place where beauty is not separated from current events and their controversies.
Taking a stand on the Israel–Palestine situation and the consequences between art and the market
For months, Nan Goldin has spoken out openly in support of the Palestinian cause, taking part in demonstrations and declaring her solidarity with the victims in Gaza and Lebanon. In an interview reported by Artribune, the artist recounted with bitterness that her market “collapsed overnight because of my support for Palestine. I discovered that many wealthy collectors in New York are Zionists.” Words that have sparked debate, but that reveal a reality often left unspoken: the art world, though it may appear progressive, is deeply intertwined with economic and political power, and those who expose themselves too much risk being excluded, silenced, and forgotten. In Goldin’s case, her stance is not an impulsive gesture, but the natural extension of an entire life devoted to giving voice to those who have none, because for her, taking a stand is not about following an empty ideology, but a moral act.
The Goldin case therefore raises an uncomfortable question: to what extent can an artist afford to be free? In a system where galleries, collectors, and foundations determine the visibility and value of artworks, freedom of expression is often subordinated to economic interests, and art that becomes activism risks disturbing political powers, suddenly becoming inappropriate. Goldin thus represents a rare figure, that of an artist willing to risk her own success for ethical consistency: her gesture and the resulting financial losses remind us that art cannot be neutral, and that success and money do not matter in the face of great injustices.
Her gaze, which once told of love and addiction in the lofts of New York, now extends to Gaza and Beirut, because she feels that suffering is universal and that an artist cannot ignore this collective cry. Today, Nan Goldin is seventy-two years old and continues to fight with the same urgency as ever, demonstrating that art, even as it increasingly becomes a new hobby for the wealthy at the mercy of market rules, is above all a powerful language, capable not only of narrating society but also of revealing those cracks that some would rather keep hidden.
