Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong
24th November 2026 – 7th March 2027
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX
Price of full price standard ticket to be announced
Concessions available & Southbank Centre Members go free
The American photographer and activist Nan Goldin returns to a UK institution for the first time since 2002, with an exhibition tracing intimacy, addiction, queer life and collective memory.
Hayward Gallery will present a major solo exhibition by Nan Goldin, one of the most influential photographers of the past half-century, from 24 November 2026 to 7 March 2027. Titled You Never Did Anything Wrong, the exhibition closes the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year and marks Goldin’s first institutional exhibition in the UK since 2002.
For five decades, Goldin has made images from within the lives she photographs. Her work is not observation from a safe distance, but an act of witness, proximity and survival. Across photographs and slideshows, she has chronicled love, desire, friendship, addiction, grief and queer community with a candour that reshaped the language of contemporary photography.
© Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Goldin has described her life’s work as “a record of my life that no one can revise”. That insistence on authorship, memory and lived truth runs through her images, which refuse neat separation between artist and subject. Her photographs are often tender, sometimes bruising, and always alert to the emotional weather of the people around her.
Since the 1970s, Goldin has explored gender, intimacy and the boundaries of what society calls normal. Her images of friends, lovers and chosen family brought visibility to bohemian and LGBT communities, many of whom were devastated by the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. These pictures became the foundation of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her landmark slideshow and first book, now regarded as one of the defining works of late 20th-century photography.
At Hayward Gallery, You Never Did Anything Wrong will place Goldin’s deeply personal visual language in renewed public focus. The exhibition will consider how private experience becomes social testimony, and how images can hold the force of both autobiography and collective history.
Goldin’s practice also extends beyond the frame. She is a founding member of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), the advocacy group that challenged pharmaceutical companies over their role in the overdose epidemic. She has also been an outspoken advocate for Palestine since the 1970s.
See also
Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Born in the United States, Goldin lives and works between New York City and Paris. Her retrospective This Will Not End Well, the first exhibition devoted to her work as a filmmaker, is currently travelling through Europe, with presentations at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; and GrandPalaisRmn, Paris.
With You Never Did Anything Wrong, Hayward Gallery brings Goldin’s uncompromising vision back to London at a moment when questions of care, memory, addiction, queer visibility and political witness remain urgent. Her work continues to ask what it means to look closely, to remember faithfully, and to make art from the fragile bonds that keep people alive.
Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong opens on the 24th of November 2026 until the 7th of March 2027 at Hayward Gallery
©2026 Hayward Gallery
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