NAN GOLDIN
"Poste Restante". Slide Shows/Grids
10.10. to 06.12.09
“These pictures come out of relationships, not observation.” Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin’s photographs are as touching and shocking today as they were thirty years ago. Their fascination does not necessarily stem from their subject matter—oscillating, as it does, between glamour and the gutter, with rare moments of normality and happiness—but from their radical intimacy. Goldin approaches only those who are close to her with her camera, thus sensitively capturing the everyday suffering from sickness, dependence, violence, and excess. She does not just empathize with the hardships of her friends and family, but is herself an essential part of their lives and experiences. Again and again, her photographic interiors and exterior views reveal the extent to which her photographs are interwoven with her own life and fate. In these works, the acute suffering of others simultaneously comes to represent Goldin’s own abject circumstances.
The immediacy of Goldin’s photographs is rooted in the fact that her own voyeurism comes together in them with the exhibitionism of those around her. She was one of the first to document drug abuse, sexual dependency, ambiguous gender roles, and the consequences of AIDS in such direct terms. With this highly political visual diary, she is still breaching taboos to this day. The feeling of personal closeness, love of life, and human warmth is always present in her visual language as well. Her photographs are not perfect pictures, but snapshots. These photographs—some of them blurry, with occasionally unbalanced distributions of color—are declarations of a professional dilettantism. In her work, the classic question of the authenticity or construction of reality in the medium of photography is not addressed. It would indeed be almost impossible to participate any more closely than Goldin does in the events portrayed.
C/O Berlin presents five of Nan Goldin’s slideshows, several of which will be seen in Berlin for the first time: “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1981), “All By Myself” (1995/96), “Heartbeat” (2003), “The Other Side” (2008) and “New Kids Show” (2008). These slide series are highly condensed stories and memories set to music compiled by Goldin herself. She expands the series and prepares different arrangements of the slides for each new show in order to reflect her changing moods, feelings, impressions, and memories. Nan Goldin has a special ability to arrange her slide shows in such a way that the static images seem to begin to move and take on a cinematic, narrative character through the succession in which they are shown.
www.co-berlin.com
