Nan Goldin — This Will Not End Well — Les Galeries nationales du Grand Palais — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 5 months: March 18 → June 21, 2026

Grand Palais’ Salon d’honneur and Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière

“I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker. My slideshows are films made up of photographs,” explains Nan Goldin.

The retrospective This Will Not End Well, organized by the Grand Palais, is the first exhibition in France to present a comprehensive overview of Nan Goldin’s work as a filmmaker, through her slideshows and videos.

It features The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), her magnum opus; The Other Side (1992–2021), a historical portrait created in tribute to her trans friends whom she 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), a dive into the ecstasy of drugs; and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a work inspired by six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, exploring the condition described by Stendhal as fainting in the face of overwhelming artistic beauty.

At the Grand Palais, the exhibition unfolds within unique pavilions designed by Hala Wardé, an architect who frequently collaborates with Goldin. Each pavilion is conceived according to the work it houses, together forming a small village.

This village extends to the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, where the installation Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, originally conceived for this space in 2004 as part of the Festival d’Automne, will be presented.

Nan Goldin (born Washington, D.C., 1953) is one of the most influential artists of our time. Her work exploring the human experience is legendary and has profoundly influenced multiple generations.

Her first major work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, documents life in Provincetown, New York, Berlin, and London from the 1970s to the 1990s. Goldin photographed her creative and bohemian circle with immense tenderness, offering intimate snapshots of relationships, everyday life, extravagant parties, hope, and despair.

Depicting a generation that experienced the freedom of life before AIDS and existed within an alternative world on the margins of society, Goldin’s work is also a testimony to her time. Around 1980, she began presenting The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in various clubs and public spaces in New York, as well as in underground cinemas and film festivals in Europe. She updated and reissued it for each projection, operating multiple projectors against an eclectic soundtrack. Goldin’s ability to revisit her slideshows has since become central to her artistic practice. Over the past forty years, she has produced around a dozen different slideshows, from portraits of friends to narratives of traumatic family events. Since 2004, she has incorporated new elements, including moving images, voices, and archival documents.

Goldin has consistently addressed social issues such as gender, mental health, and AIDS through diverse approaches. Memory Lost explores the darker aspects of drug addiction. In 2017, she founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct-action group specifically targeting the Sackler family, billionaire donors held responsible for triggering the opioid overdose epidemic. The Sacklers are major benefactors of numerous internationally renowned museums, yet many institutions responded to P.A.I.N.’s pressure by removing all traces of the Sackler name from their spaces.

Although the exhibition title This Will Not End Well may appear dark and foreboding, it is also imbued with irony and emotion. It affirms what Fredrik Liew, curator of the retrospective, describes as Goldin’s “unshakable joie de vivre.” Originally presented at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (29 October 2022 — 26 February 2023), This Will Not End Well has toured internationally, with exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (7 October 2023 — 28 January 2024), the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (23 November 2024 — 6 April 2025), and the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan (9 October 2025 — 15 February 2026).

Curator: Fredrik Liew, Director of Exhibitions and Collections, Chief Curator at Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Associate Curator for the Paris presentation: Barbara Kroher, Head of Exhibition Programming, GrandPalaisRmn