NAN GOLDIN: SISTERS, SAINTS, SIBYLS
Gagosian is pleased to announce Sisters, Saints, Sibyls. Images of Saint Barbara accompany a voiceover that describes her defiance of her parents’ beliefs, a transgression for which they tortured her.
May 30 - June 23, 2024
Goldin begins her film Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–22) with the myth of Saint Barbara, presenting the story of the early Christian martyr as a three-channel projection that echoes the triptych format of classical religious painting. Images of Saint Barbara accompany a voiceover that describes her defiance of her parents’ beliefs, a transgression for which they tortured her.
In 1958, Goldin’s elder sister, Barbara Holly Goldin, was sent to a psychiatric detention center at age twelve. She spent time in and out of such facilities for the next six years. Barbara was accused of “acting out, open defiance, sexually provocative behavior, association with undesirable friends, [and being] loud and coarse in speech.”
Goldin was a witness to the physical and psychic abuse that Barbara suffered and that her family tried to conceal. Barbara’s death by suicide in 1965, at the age of eighteen, was a defining event in Goldin’s life, prompting her to rebel against and run away from her living situation at the time, and the remainder of Sisters, Saints, Sibyls describes how she found her tribe of fellow rebels.
For the site of the Gagosian Open presentation of Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, Goldin chose a deconsecrated church in Soho known as the Welsh chapel. The installation is a visceral, immersive environment, referencing nineteenth-century operating theaters. The piece was originally conceived in 2004, for the chapel of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris.
The presentation coincides with an exhibition of select early black-and-white photographs by Goldin at Gagosian, Burlington Arcade, London, from May 14 to June 22. Concurrently, Goldin will take over the Gagosian Shop with a reading room of books she has chosen, publications on her work, and a display of in-progress layouts from Heartbeat, a forthcoming nine-volume catalogue raisonné published by Steidl.
This Will Not End Well is a retrospective focused on Goldin’s moving-image work, recently on view at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022–23), and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2023–24), and traveling to the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; and Grand Palais, Paris, over the next two years.