Photographer Nan Goldin arrives for the National Board of Review Awards Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City in January, 2023.ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images
American photographer Nan Goldin made a vigorous pitch for artist activism at a Vancouver event Tuesday, but largely avoided more controversial statements about her pro-Palestinian stance.
The artist was speaking at an event organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, which has recently acquired Stendhal Syndrome, a 2024 slideshow drawn from Ms. Goldin’s own archives, juxtaposing photographs of her friends with Renaissance and Baroque paintings from museums.
The piece became controversial in Canada when the Art Gallery of Ontario declined to proceed with what was supposed to be a shared acquisition with the VAG. Last year, an AGO acquisition committee voted against the proposed purchase because of Ms. Goldin’s vociferous criticisms of Israel and the war in Gaza, although the slideshow is unrelated. The VAG and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis went ahead.
As VAG curator and interim co-director Eva Respini introduced Ms. Goldin’s career, the artist warned it “doesn’t come without controversy.” Ms. Respini then deadpanned: “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Their conversation mainly stuck to a discussion of Stendhal Syndrome, named for a condition where a viewer is physically overcome by the experience of beauty in art, before turning to the topic of activism.
Ms. Goldin described how she got involved in the movement to get better medical care for AIDS patients in the 1980s and fought to get the Sackler name removed from museums because of the family pharmaceutical company’s link to the opioid crisis. Although she has long criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, she did not offer any specific strategies other than continued protest for stopping the war in Gaza that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel by Hamas.
“My activism is my work, as well as my pictures or my slideshows. And it’s as important to me as anything in my life,” she said, fully agreeing with an audience member who had submitted a question identifying Palestine as “the greatest moral question of our time.”
Asked for advice for the many art students attending the event in the Vancouver Playhouse, she said: “My advice is don’t look for safe spaces. You grow from pain, you grow from putting yourself in a situation that’s very difficult. You don’t grow from safe spaces.
“I think the big thing for young people is to be courageous,” she said. “… and not censor yourself, most of all. You’re the hope of the world. You have to take up that mantle.”
Despite Ms. Goldin’s distaste for trigger warnings, the event organizers took a break before screening her new film Gaza, so that those who might be upset by the violence it depicts could leave the auditorium. The film, which Ms. Goldin refers to as a document rather than art, is a silent compilation of social media and news footage of scenes from Gaza. It includes bombarded buildings exploding into rubble and body bags lying in the streets while focusing on the fears and grief of Palestinian children, shown weeping in several scenes.
A still image from Nan Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome, 2024, single-channel video. The work was acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., after the AGO’s involvement fell through.Nan Goldin/Vancouver Art Gallery and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
The film has been screened in Milan, Paris and New York.
In a controversial speech in 2024 at an opening of a retrospective of her work in Berlin, Ms. Goldin decried the war in Gaza and spoke against German censorship of criticisms of Israel. Asked in Vancouver about the price she had paid for those remarks, she said she had lost several years of sales, but she insisted on the obligation of museums to hear all voices.
Fielding questions from the audience via texts to her phone, Ms. Respini asked Ms. Goldin what responsibility art institutions had in the face of the Gaza war: “Not to cancel anyone,” Ms. Goldin replied, one of her few oblique references to the AGO situation. “To show support to artists who need to take a position, need to speak, and every institution should be speaking themselves, should be engaging.”
Ms. Respini also asked Ms. Goldin for her thoughts on social media because her slideshows featuring casual images of her intimates are seen as precursors, but the artist rejected the idea that she is the “grandmother of social media.”
Drawing on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Stendhal Syndrome casts her friends as mythological characters, such as Orpheus, Pygmalion and Diana, many of them doomed in love. Using her existing archive of intimate photos going back decades, she finds visual similarities between contemporary people and historic paintings.
Ms. Respini referred to the work as “a love letter to museums.”