
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the body behind the Neue Nationalgalerie, must have been dreading the opening night of Nan Goldin’s latest exhibition, cursing museum director Klaus Biesenbach for programming a show with the world’s most celebrated photographer – who just happens to be one of the fiercest advocates for the plight of Palestine. She didn’t hold back. At her opening ceremony, after first orchestrating a four-minute silence, Goldin launched into a condemnation of the Israel-Gaza war, decrying what she termed the German government’s complicity abroad and censorship at home.
For years, the Jewish-American artist has been the cultural world’s self-appointed moral compass. Before directing her anger at the German state, she took aim at the Sackler family – whose wealth is partly derived from peddling the pain- (and mass) killer OxyContin – ousting their name from institutions, which had gouged themselves on their philanthropy.
‘Memory Lost’ (2019-21), the first work in the exhibition, deals with her experiences of the drug and the devastating human toll of the opioid crisis. Slides of loosely connected imagery (portraits of the artist, a brown-toned doorway, couples kissing, an artist book covered with lines of crushed pills) are soundtracked by long, resonating string notes and voicemail messages left to the artist by her concerned friends, recorded during Goldin’s own battle with OxyContin addiction. Synthesised together, the work has a tremendous emotional impact, an intensity that leaves you almost breathless. Its shifting, static slides emphasise the permanence of time passing, just as its fragmentation conveys an urgency of memories aching with regret, beauty and torment.
There are six films in total, each housed in individual black, spongey silos designed by architect Hala Wardé. Despite amplifying the experience, the caves lack soundproofing, so you’re often distracted by the sounds (Nick Cave’s crooning) bleeding in from neighbouring works such as the film Sirens – a companion to ‘Memory Lost’ – that uses found footage to convey the dizzying, euphoric splendour of being high. Conceived as a homage to the first black supermodel, Donyake Luna, who died from an overdose in 1979, it lacks the guttural honesty of her personal work, the haunting, confessional exposure of her slideshows.
That sense of personal intimacy is taken to extremes with the multi-channel video work Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls, which focuses on the death of Goldin’s older sister who committed suicide at 18. There is a bitterness unlike anything else in the exhibition, the artist’s closeness to the material giving it a kind of visceral hysteria. By the end, you’ve seen enough, the formula becomes repetitive and there’s only so much you can take, which makes you question the wisdom of showing all six film works together. But then, when you consider the exhaustiveness of what you’ve been put through, the bleak tenderness of it all, for once, how you see them doesn’t matter – only that you have.
- Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer str. 50, Mitte-Tiergarten Süd, now – Apr 6, details here.