This Will Not End Well arrives at the Grand Palais as a full-bodied retrospective that compresses fifty years of images into a sensory sequence. The project, built around slide projections and video installations, presents the work of Nan Goldin, now 72, as motion rather than static display. Visitors meet portraits, party scenes and private rooms not as single prints on a wall but as part of a continuous rhythm where light, sound and image cohere. The show is on view at the Grand Palais until 21 June 2026, continuing a tour that has already stopped in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin and Milan.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency remains central to the retrospective, recalling its origin as a scored slideshow in New York at the end of the 1970s. Goldin assembled sequences of her friends, lovers and communities—drag performers, artists and intimates—into a sort of visual mixtape, pairing photographs with a curated soundtrack. In this format she translated personal diary material into a communal archive: the pleasures, violences, addictions and losses of a generation become visible and legible. The slideshow method foregrounds montage, pacing and musical pairing, which shape the narrative as much as any single image.
An architecture that lives with the work
The exhibition architecture plays an active role: Lebanese architect Hala Wardé designed a constellation of velvet-draped projection rooms that function like inhabitable pavilions. Rather than reconstructing scenes for display, these enclosed spaces are built to be entered and experienced, guiding visitors from one atmosphere to another—clubs, beaches, chapels, cinemas—without resorting to literal sets. This approach echoes a past collaboration between the photographer and the architect and reinforces an idea central to the show: images are lived-in spaces. Each pavilion has its own color, shape and sonic environment, so the visitor moves through a mapped network of memory rather than an ordered gallery of objects.
Presentation and practical notes
The format—five main slideshow and video installations—creates a prescribed sequence and can require queuing to enter each darkened chamber. The projection rooms impose a shared temporal experience: images advance together with their soundtracks, which include selections from The Velvet Underground, The Communards, Charles Aznavour and Marianne Faithfull among others. The slideshow structure also means some viewers will prefer to begin with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, then visit The Other Side or Memory Lost, choosing the order that suits their attention. One recent gallery guide suggested alternating the older and newer sequences to feel the arc of continuity in Goldin’s practice.
Themes: intimacy, loss and witness
Goldin’s photographs are unmistakably autobiographical yet directed outward: they register personal events as collective experience. The show foregrounds work about the HIV/AIDS crisis, opioid addiction and the aftermath of familial trauma. Series such as Memory Lost document struggles with opioid dependency; Sirens evokes the disorienting appeal of drugs through filmic clips; and Sisters, Saints, Sibyls interrogates grief and psychiatric confinement after the death of Goldin’s sister. Importantly, The Other Side presents compassionate portraits of transgender friends without exoticizing them. Across these threads, the images resist voyeurism by placing the photographer inside the scenes she records, insisting on proximity and emotional participation.
A cinematic sensibility
Curators and collaborators have pointed out that Goldin’s aim was never merely to make standalone photographs but to compose sequences with cinematic intent. The exhibition emphasizes montage, tempo and soundtrack as structural devices: photography becomes a film-like medium where editing and rhythm shape meaning. This sensibility allows recurring faces to reappear across works, converting private acquaintances into a cohort of recurring protagonists. The result is a sustained elegy that feels like a long-form remembrance—one that catalogs names, remembers those lost and resists the erasure of marginalized communities.
A living memorial and public response
Beyond the personal, the retrospective functions as a memorial. Credits name those who have died, and the artist has included tributes that extend outward, noting contemporary tragedies that haunt her practice. The presentation reframes the archive as a site of testimony where joy and tenderness coexist with mourning. For visitors, the encounter can be unsettling and consoling at once: a reminder that photography can be both intimate record and collective history. The show asks viewers to inhabit memory with care, to feel the textures of time as images move and sound guides the eye.
Experiencing This Will Not End Well at the Grand Palais is therefore less about inspecting objects than about being carried through an emotional geography. The exhibition’s layered audio-visual program, its pavilionized layout and its insistence on sequence make it a rare example of photography staged as filmic procession. For anyone drawn to work that blurs autobiography with social chronicle, the retrospective offers a powerful immersion in a life and community that refuse to be forgotten.