Between love, loss and survival: Nan Goldin’s new exhibition opens at Hayward Gallery 

The Nan Goldin photography exhibition You Never Did Anything Wrong opens at Hayward Gallery, London, from November 24th, 2026, to March 7th, 2027, marking the artist’s first UK institutional exhibition since 2002. As the final highlight of Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year, the exhibition brings together recent films, photographs, and archival works exploring intimacy, addiction, activism, and the fragile bonds between humans, animals, and nature.

For over five decades, Nan Goldin has reshaped photography through her intimate portraits of relationships, queer communities, addiction, and vulnerability. Her images dissolve the distance between artist and subject, blending autobiography, social history, and emotional testimony. Goldin captures life in all its contradictions—love, desire, grief, and survival—transforming personal experiences into reflections on shared human struggles and the power of memory.

Turning the lens towards animals and the earth

The exhibition’s centrepiece is the two-part film project You Never Did Anything Wrong, Part I (2024) and Part II (2026), which expands Goldin’s focus from human stories to animal consciousness and environmental fragility. Filmed on 16mm, Part I begins with a solar eclipse and draws from an ancient myth of animals reclaiming the sun. Featuring music by Valerij Fedorenko and a score by Mica Levi, the film explores non-human worlds and is dedicated to Sulala Animal Rescue in Gaza.

Created with filmmaker David Sherman, Part II combines found footage, damaged recordings, and archival nature films from the 1960s and 1970s. The work examines how images shape our understanding of other species while reflecting on landscapes, extinction, and ecological loss.

A lifetime of intimacy, memory and resistance

The exhibition features the UK premiere of Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a film pairing Goldin’s portraits of friends and lovers with artworks from museum collections worldwide. Through visual echoes of colour, composition, and emotion, the work places her community within a wider history of art. Memory Lost (2019–2021) revisits Goldin’s experiences with addiction through personal slides and archival material. Dedicated to P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), the activist group she founded, the project explores addiction with honesty while advocating for compassion and harm reduction.

Alongside films, Hayward Gallery will showcase photographs, including new works linked to You Never Did Anything Wrong. Designed with architect Hala Wardé, the exhibition creates distinct settings for each piece, allowing Goldin’s images and films to resonate with emotional intensity.