Nan Goldin’s first UK institutional exhibition since 2002 brings four recent films to the Hayward, including the public debut of You never did anything wrong, Part II.
Nan Goldin, the photographer of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, opens at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank on Tuesday 24 November 2026. The show is her first institutional exhibition in the UK since 2002.
Goldin was born in Washington, DC, in 1953 and was given her first camera at 16. Her early black-and-white portraits of Boston’s transgender community became her first solo show in 1973.
After moving to New York in 1978, she photographed her chosen family among New Wave clubs, No Wave cinema and post-Stonewall gay culture. The Ballad, a slideshow of almost 700 images, was published as a book in 1986.
She confronted the AIDS epidemic from the 1980s. In 2017, after her own addiction to OxyContin, she founded P.A.I.N. to campaign against the Sackler name. Laura Poitras’s documentary about her, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2022.
The exhibition closes the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year and centres on four recent films. They are Memory Lost, Stendhal Syndrome and the two parts of You never did anything wrong, with Part II shown in public for the first time.
Stills and images from Goldin’s archive hang alongside them.