The Hayward Gallery to present a major solo exhibition by acclaimed American artist and activist Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong.
“While UK audiences may have seen glimpses of Nan’s story, this major exhibition will offer a long overdue institutional-scale immersion into the world of a true revolutionary. The Hayward’s show extends an invitation to experience work that is essential for understanding the interconnectedness of personal
Rachel Thomas, Roden Chief Curator,
experience and political action, revealing the human condition in all of its beauty and fragility.”
Rounding off the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year, the exhibition will run from 24th November 2026 – 7th March 2027 and marks Goldin’s first institutional exhibition in the UK since 2002.
Over the past five decades, Nan Goldin has documented personal relationships, addiction and queer communities, forming an autobiography she calls “a record of my life that no one can revise”. Her unflinching images have transformed photography by closing the distance between the observer and the observed, capturing the rawness of the artist’s own life and that of her people. Comprising deeply intimate photographs and slideshows, her stories embrace the complexity of life, standing as universal tales of love and loss.
“Nan Goldin has reshaped the language of photography, transforming the medium into a profound living record of human intimacy and resilience. At the Hayward Gallery, we are thrilled to host her first major UK
Mark Ball, Southbank Centre’s Artistic Director
exhibition for over two decades with work that captures the soul of her practice. To bring her radical vision to our Brutalist spaces is a moment of immense pride, offering our audiences an encounter with an artist who has never looked away.”
Nan Goldin, 24th November 2026 – 7th March 2027, Hayward Gallery
About the artist
Nan Goldin is an American photographer and artist. Since the 1970s, her work has explored notions of gender and definitions of normality. By documenting her life and the lives of the friends who surround
her, Goldin gives a voice and visibility to her communities, especially the bohemian LGBT communities,
which were deeply impacted by the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. These images of her
“extended family” became the subject of her seminal slide show and first book The Ballad of Sexual
Dependency. Her retrospective, This Will Not End Well, the first exhibition dedicated to her work as a
filmmaker, is currently travelling through Europe (Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; and Grand Palais, Paris).
She is the founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now)
which targeted the pharmaceutical companies responsible for the overdose epidemic. She has been
an outspoken advocate for Palestine since the 1970s. She lives and works in New York City and
Paris.
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