For the first time since 2002, the Hayward Gallery is staging a major institutional exhibition by Nan Goldin, one of the most influential photographers of the late twentieth century. Opening on 24 November, You Never Did Anything Wrong brings together four recent films and a selection of archive photographs, including the public debut of a new work that marks a striking shift in the artist's half-century practice.
A Departure From the Human Circle
Goldin built her reputation on proximity. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her genre-defining photobook first published in 1986, turned the private lives of her friends, lovers and chosen family in Boston and New York into one of the defining visual records of late-twentieth-century life. She did not observe from a distance; she was already inside the room. Her photographs have always come from relationships rather than observation, and that distinction is what gives them their disarming power.
The new exhibition takes that intimacy and redirects it. Where Goldin once photographed bedrooms, bars and queer subcultures, the two-part title work turns towards animals, landscape and the threat of extinction. Part I, filmed around a total solar eclipse on Super 8 and 16mm, contains no human figures at all. It is dedicated to Sulala, Gaza's oldest animal rescue, and moves through a world of animal consciousness that feels like a natural extension of her lifelong politics of attention.
Four Films, Four Rooms
The exhibition is structured around four moving-image works of roughly 20 minutes each, screened in individual rooms designed by the architect Hala Warde. Visitors should expect to spend close to 80 minutes in the screening spaces alone, and the Hayward has warned of queues during peak times. Photographs from Goldin's archive, some never shown before, hang in the spaces between the screening rooms.
Memory Lost (2019-2021) traces Goldin's own history with drugs and addiction, drawing on archive photographs to build a narrative that is both personal and political. The film is dedicated to P.A.I.N., the advocacy group Goldin founded to challenge the opioid crisis. Stendhal Syndrome (2024) places her portraits of friends and lovers beside Classical, Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces from the Borghese, the Louvre, the Met and the Prado, drawing visual correspondences that span centuries. Structured around Ovid's Metamorphoses, the work inserts her community into the art historical canon not as outsiders but as figures who, as Goldin puts it, have always been here.
The Public Debut of Part II
The centrepiece of the exhibition is the first public showing of You Never Did Anything Wrong, Part II (2026). Made in collaboration with filmmaker David Sherman, the work reworks damaged 16mm nature documentaries from the 1960s and 1970s, examining the inherited ways humans have been taught to look at other species. A new score by the composer Mica Levi, who also scored Part I, lends the film an elegiac quality that sits somewhere between requiem and warning.
Together, the two parts of the title work feel less like a departure than a logical expansion of the ethics Goldin has spent five decades constructing. The domestic interiors and city nights that once served as her primary stages give way to a vast elemental domain encompassing flora, fauna, subterranean wildfire and the cosmic darkness of an eclipse. Grounded in the ecological truth that nothing exists alone, Goldin treats landscapes and non-human life with the same reciprocity she once reserved for human portraits.
Practical Information
You Never Did Anything Wrong runs from 24 November 2026 to 14 March 2027 at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London. Tickets are priced at £19, with free entry for members. Saturday opening hours extend to 8pm. The exhibition contains drug use, nudity and sexual imagery, and is recommended for ages 12 and above.