For the First Time in 20 Years, a Major Nan Goldin Show Is Coming to London

Nan Goldin b. 1953, United States Follow +

The Hayward Gallery has announced a solo exhibition of work by the American photographer and activist Nan Goldin, the first institutional solo show of her work in the UK in over 20 years. The show, titled You Never Did Anything Wrong, will run from November 2026 until March 2027, concluding the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year. 

Goldin is known for her hyper-personal documentation of the downtown scene in 1980’s New York. Her photographs are populated by her friends and chosen family, many of whom were part of the city’s queer community during the AIDS crisis. She has had several significant exhibitions in recent years, including a show at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2023 and another at Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin last year. The Hayward Gallery show marks her first institutional show in London since the touring exhibit ‘Devil’s Playground’ at the Whitechapel gallery in 2002. 

Rachel Thomas, Roden Chief Curator at the Hayward Gallery said in a statement: “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.” Mark Ball, Southbank Centre’s Artistic Director, added: “we are thrilled to host her first major UK 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”.

Goldin has attracted attention for her art and activism work over the past decade. In 2017, she founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct action group which fought to expose the Sackler family’s involvement in the opioid crisis. This was dramatised in the 2022 documentary, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Lion. 

Her show at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, an immersive, large-scale showcase of her seminal slideshows and films such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), also drew commentary, with a video of Goldin speaking out against the war in Gaza at the opening being widely shared. The artist began her speech with four minutes of silence, during which she asked the crowd not to go on their phones, to commemorate the dead in Palestine, Israel and Lebanon. “I decided to use this exhibition as my platform, to amplify my position of moral outrage,” she said. “I hope I am paving a path that others can speak out without being censored.”

Ball described her as an artist who has “reshaped the language of photography, transforming the medium into a profound living record of human intimacy and resilience”.