Totally Stockholm 1
Nan Goldin, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston (1973
) From the slideshow The Other Side, 1992–2021 © Nan Goldin STORYTELLER This winter, Moderna Museet offers a retrospective of Nan Goldin’s artistry. Words: Sara Bäckbro Through configurations of urban environments covered in cloth, visitors to the Nan Goldin exhibition at Moderna Museet will get to experience her art vividly and interactively. Her boundary-breaking art has, of course, been exhibited all over the world but in this new interpretation of her slideshow art from a narrative perspective, the show will travel from Stockholm to Amsterdam, Berlin and Milan. Moderna Museet’s chief intendent Fredrik Liew tells us more about the exhibition. “I called Nan Goldin up and told her nervously that we wanted to showcase a retrospective of her first 10 photos, but not in the classic sense of an exhibition – instead, using her whole slideshow. The fascination of her art is based on her being one of the world’s most well-known photographers, but also one who expresses herself in a multimedia context. In the conversation she explained that she never wanted to become a photographer, but rather a filmmaker and storyteller”. Nan Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington D.C. and moved to New York in the ’70s, where she began photographing and documenting her various experiences. She went to both photo school and art school, and began working with slideshows, which she showcased through various kodak carousels. She regularly went to the movies and had a dream of becoming a filmmaker. In New York at the end of the ’70s she started showcasing her images in various club environments. They were made up of sequences from her life covering different relationships, her friends and herself. People got to experience Nan’s photography, accompanied by the club’s music, and in each other’s close company. At the end of the ’80s the slideshow was programmed with a soundtrack, and a title - The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.