Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Nan Goldin: Memory Lost | Marian Goodman Gallery New York
aprile 09, 2021 - Marian Goodman Gallery

Nan Goldin: Memory Lost | Marian Goodman Gallery New York

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Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to announce Memory Lost, our first exhibition in New York with #nangoldin, who joined the gallery in September 2018.

This major exhibition will be the first solo presentation by the artist in New York in five years and will present an important range of historical works together with two new video pieces and the debut of two new series of photographs.

Memory Lost (2019), an important, new digital slideshow, recounts a life lived through a lens of drug addiction. This captivating, beautiful and haunting journey unfolds through an assemblage of intimate and personal imagery to offer a poignant reflection on memory and the darkness of addiction. It is one of the most moving, personal and arresting works of Goldin’s career to date. It is accompanied by an emotionally charged new score commissioned from composer and instrumentalist Mica Levi, with additional music by CJ Calderwood and Soundwalk Collective. Documenting a life at once familiar and reframed, newly discovered archival images are edited to portray memory as lived and witnessed experience, altered and lost through drug addiction. A group of stills from Memory Lost, presented here as dye sublimation prints on aluminium for the first time in Goldin’s career, gathers work from a period when the outcome of a photograph was unpredictable. Technical mistakes allowed for magic; random psychological subtexts that could not have been created intentionally could make the subconscious visible.

In conjunction with Memory Lost, another new video work, Sirens (2019­–2020), will be presented in the North Gallery. This is the first work by Goldin made entirely from found footage––scenes from thirty of her favorite films––and is accompanied by a new score by Mica Levi. Echoing the enchanting call of the Sirens from Greek mythology, who lured sailors to their untimely deaths on rocky shores, this hypnotic work entrances the viewer into the sensuality and ecstasy of being high.

In an adjacent space, a new series of pictures taken entirely from her home during quarantine (2020–2021) mark a return to Goldin’s best-known work. The subject of these portraits, writer Thora Siemsen, inspired Goldin to pick up her camera and document her personal life again. During the paradigm shift between what we’ve known and a new reality still unknown, Goldin has made a timeless portrait of her friend and of her home. Amidst the terrors and limitations of the global pandemic, Goldin arrives at a place where time is crystallized by presence, stillness, and intimacy.

In the South Gallery, Goldin presents a series of large skies and landscapes taken over the last thirty years during her travels through the world. The rich tonality and subtlety of these large images convey an ethereal, abstract quality that sits in counterpoint to the rest of the exhibition. Goldin’s skies float, unframed, evoking the enormity of the sky and her desire to photograph emptiness.

A newly edited version of the slideshow, The Other Side (1993–2021), will be presented in the Third Floor Gallery as an analog piece for the first time in fourteen years. The Other Side was produced as an homage to the artist’s transgender friends whom she lived with and photographed from 1972 to 2010. The work celebrates the “gender euphoria” of her friends, in their possibilities for transcendence. In the introduction to the first edition of the book, The Other Side, published in 1992, Goldin wrote: “The #people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners of the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring.” In the updated version of The Other Side, published by Steidl in 2019, Goldin reaffirms it as “a record of the courage of the #people who transformed that landscape to allow trans #people the freedom of now. My dream since I was a kid was of a world with completely fluid gender and sexuality, which has come true as manifested by all those living publicly as gender non-conforming. The invisible has become visible.” (Goldin, Nan, The Other Side, Steidl, Germany, 2019, pg.8).


While acknowledging the gaps in her own understanding of the current language around gender identity, Goldin adds that, although “she can’t freely navigate the terrain without stumbling,” she recognizes the importance of bringing these images into the public consciousness again. “It’s important for them to know they’re not alone, and to know how they go there.” She dedicates both the slideshow and the book to all the trans sisters lost to violence.


Further information in the press release to download