The many lives of Nan Goldin

For almost two years, Nan Goldin has been waging a war on America’s pharmaceutical industry. Her vitriol has been aimed at the Sackler family, who have made a name for themselves as global art patrons (pouring money into institutions including the Metropolitan Museum in New York and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum) but whose wealth derives from Purdue Pharma, a company that manufactures the prescription opioid OxyContin believed to have contributed to America’s opioid crisis. Goldin has spoken extensively about her addiction to the drug as a result of a hand injury in 2014, and since emerging from rehab in 2017, has held a series of protests with the activist group she has subsequently founded Pain (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) outside major art institutions (a number of art museums in the UK and US are no longer accepting the Sackler family’s donations). 

Now, as part of a new exhibition, called Sirens, at London’s Marian Goodman Gallery, Goldin is presenting a digital slideshow that recounts her experience of drug addiction. Memory Lost (2019) reflects on the darkness of addiction through a series of personal images that suggest the way in which substances alter, dilute and make strange one’s memories. Elsewhere, there is a new video work which lends the show its title, and a newly edited slideshow of Goldin’s classic and recently updated series, The Other Side (1994-2019)—a stirring photographic tribute to Goldin’s friends and muses in the transgender community, since the 1970s onwards. As the exhibition opens during Transgender Awareness Week, the inclusion of this series, including gorgeous portraits such as Greer Modelling Jewellery (1985), is a telling reminder of the necessity of representation and of Goldin’s own fearless pursuit to make those who have been historically invisible visible. And, in what might be an unexpected pivot, Goldin presents alongside these works a series of large scale sky and landscape images taken in the 2000s across Brazil, France, Ireland and Italy—alluding to Goldin’s lifelong search for peace of mind, beauty and transcendence. 

Sirens runs from 14 November 2019  to 11 January 2020 at Marian Goodman Gallery London. 

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery New York, Paris and London.