Nan Goldin

New Collection
2 Mar – 2 Jun 2024
Art Gallery of Ballarat, VIC

Nan Goldin, Mark tattooing Mark, Boston, 1978, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia's 40th anniversary, 2022 © Nan Goldin

'For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.’

NAN GOLDIN

About

The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. Nan Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which has recently become part of the National Gallery’s collection.

Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place, and do so in a way that has real social purpose. Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would be decimated by HIV/AIDS and drug-related deaths. The ballad has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.

Goldin refers to The ballad as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships—relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.

Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography

VIEWER ADVICE

The photographs in Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency depict the everyday lives, often in intimate detail, of people in Goldin’s immediate community during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Please be advised that works of art in this exhibition depict explicit nudity, sexual acts, drug use, and the impacts of violence against women.

Viewer discretion is advised.

This exhibition is not suitable for children under the age of 15.

Exhibition supported by

Logo for the organisation DOCPLAY

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is developed in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ballarat and the National Gallery of Australia through the Regional Initiatives Program, supported by Major Partner AWM Electrical and Data Suppliers.

Dates & Venues

Dates & Venues

  • National Gallery of Australia, ACT
    8 Jul 2023 – 28 Jan 2024
  • Art Gallery of Ballarat, VIC
    2 Mar – 2 Jun 2024

Related

Essay

Nan Goldin’s lens on relationships
The ballad of sexual dependency

Colour Cibachrome photograph of a man and a woman, with the woman's arms around his neck smiling.

Curator of Photography Anne O’Hehir probes Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency (1986) – the defining work of Goldin’s life.

Read Time: 37 minutes
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