nan goldin

Nan Goldin (*1953, Washington, D.C.) occupies a central position in contemporary photography. Her photographs speak directly and unsparingly of the private life of the artist, who has continually portrayed her friends as well as herself. The exhibition at the kestnergesellschaft focuses on her latest series of works, “Scopophilia”, which in this extent is being shown for the first time in Germany.

Goldin’s legendary work “The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency” brought her international attention in the early 1980s. With her photographs, she has had a crucial influence on the artistic approach of the subjective gaze in contemporary photography. Her pictures deal with the attempt of people to connect, the struggle for autonomy, issues of gender identification, friendship, love and lost. Usually Goldin presents her photographs as a slide show or arranges a number of photographs into thematic grids that reveal narrative connections between the individual pictures. Goldin’s works can be read as a kind of personal, visual diary, while at the same time they consistently point to cultural, social, and societal developments of their time.

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Nan Goldin | Sisters, 2010 | Chromogenic Print | 61 x 150 cm | Courtesy the artist Matthew Marks Gallery, New York[/caption]

“Scopophilia” consists of over 400 photographs, which the artist combined into a 25-minute slide show. In this series Goldin juxtaposes new photographs that she took of selected paintings and sculptures at the Louvre in Paris with her early works of her friends and lovers. She thus not only draws from the rich inventory of art history, but also revisits her own oeuvre from the past 40 years. The photographs integrated in Scopophilia are spanning a broad chronological range from the late 1970s till today. The astonishing parallels between the two pictorial worlds develop an intense visual attraction. The Greek word scopophilia means “love of looking.” A soundtrack created for the slide show is a soprano singing Ovid`s metamorphosis in ancient latin that is recorded in the empty halls of the Louvre. The exhibition also includes individual pictures from the Scopophilia series arranged into grids and diptychs.

Furthermore, selected earlier grids as well as newly rearranged grids will be shown. These works reflect on wide-ranging states of being. “Shape Shifting” portrays rebirth and transformation; “Missing” deals with the painful experience of losing a number of her oldest and closest friends to the plague of Aids which has decimated her community. In addition the exhibition includes photographs of empty spaces and inhabited rooms that leave traces of personal histories.

The exhibition is curated by Lotte Dinse. A solo exhibition with works by Pipilotti Rist will also be on view from 19 June to 27 September 2015.