Nan Goldin Will Present a Major London Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery
Spanning five decades of raw, autobiographical photography.
The Hayward Gallery in London announced a major solo exhibition by acclaimed American artist and activist Nan Goldin, titled You Never Did Anything Wrong. Marking a significant moment for UK audiences, the show will close out the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year. It also marks Goldin’s first institutional exhibition in the UK since 2002.
Across more than five decades, Goldin has built a deeply personal visual archive documenting intimacy, addiction, friendship and queer communities. Describing her practice as “a record of my life that no one can revise,” her work collapses the distance between photographer and subject, offering an unfiltered view into lived experience. Through raw, emotionally charged imagery and immersive slideshow installations, she transforms autobiography into collective memory, capturing the tenderness and turbulence of human connection.
Rather than presenting life as polished or resolved, Goldin’s lens embraces its contradictions of love, loss, joy and dependency, rendered with striking honesty. Her images have long been credited with reshaping contemporary photography, shifting it toward a more immediate, emotionally direct form of storytelling.
As chief curator Rachel Thomas notes, the exhibition offers “a long overdue institutional-scale immersion into the world of a true revolutionary.” Southbank Centre artistic director Mark Ball adds that the show brings her “radical vision” into dialogue with the Hayward’s Brutalist architecture, offering audiences an encounter with an artist who has “never looked away.”
The exhibition opens on November 24 at the Hayward Gallery, so mark your calendars.
In other news, Vivienne Westwood’s jewelry is getting an exhibition.
