The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Relié)

Biographie de Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and began photographing at the age of fifteen. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1977. In 1978 she moved to New York, where she continued to document her "extended family." These photographs, along with those taken in London, Berlin, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, became the subject of her slide shows and first book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
In 1985 her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's biennial. A decade later, in 1996, a major retrospective of her work opened at the Whitney, and toured to museums throughout Europe. That same year a documentary about her life and work, I'll Be Your Mirror, made in collaboration with Edmund Coulthard, was awarded a Teddy Award for Best Essay at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2001 a second retrospective of Goldin's work, Le Feu Follet, was held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and toured internationally as The Devil's Playground.
Among the artist's other slide shows are Heartbeat, Fire Leap, All By Myself, The Other Side, Memory Lost, and Sirens. In 2004, as part of the Festival d'Automne, her work Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls was displayed in the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Paris. A few years later, the Louvre specially commissioned a slide show, exhibiting the resulting Scopophilia in 2010. Nan Goldin's work has been published extensively, and her books include The Other Side (1993), A Double Life (with David Armstrong, 1994), Tokyo Love (with Nobuyoshi Araki, 1995), I'll Be Your Mirror (1997), Ten Years After (1997), The Devil's Playground (2003), The Beautiful Smile (2008), and Diving for Pearls (2016).
Goldin is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including a DAAD Artists-in-Residence Program, Berlin ; a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts ; the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres from the French government ; the Hasselblad Award in Photography ; and the Englehard Award. In 2012 she received the Edward MacDowell Medal and in 2018, the Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society, London.
The artist is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and her work has been exhibited at significant institutions worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris ; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid ; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki ; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro ; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency first existed as a forty-five-minute multimedia presentation, consisting of more than seven hundred images and a musical sound track.
Constantly reedited and updated, Ballad began its life on the club circuit in New York and has since been shown around the world, and is now held in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, both in New York ; Art Institute of Chicago ; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland ; Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris ; Tate Modem, London ; and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France.
Nan Goldin lives in Berlin, Paris, and New York, but resides mostly in airports.