Nan Goldin Returns to London’s Hayward Gallery for First U.K. Institutional Show Since 2002
Nan Goldin is set to bring a major exhibition to London’s Hayward Gallery this fall, marking a significant return to the U.K. institutional stage. Titled “You Never Did Anything Wrong,” the show will open on November 24, 2026, and remain on view through March 7, 2027. It will also conclude the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year.
The exhibition will assemble photographs and slideshow works from across the American artist and activist’s career, offering a broad view of a practice that has shaped contemporary photography for more than five decades. Goldin (b. 1953) is widely known for images that move with unusual candor through addiction, romance, grief, queer life, and friendship. Her work often feels diaristic without becoming confessional for its own sake; instead, it records the emotional texture of a life lived among others.
According to the Southbank Centre, the Hayward presentation will examine Goldin’s evolving commitment to documenting relationships and communities that have often been left outside mainstream representation. That focus has long been inseparable from her political activism. In recent years, Goldin has also become an outspoken advocate for people affected by the opioid crisis, extending the social urgency of her photographs beyond the gallery wall.
Rachel Thomas, the Hayward Gallery’s Roden Chief Curator, said in a statement that U.K. audiences may have seen only fragments of Goldin’s story before now. She described the exhibition as an institutional-scale immersion into the world of “a true revolutionary,” and said it would reveal “the human condition in all of its beauty and fragility.” Mark Ball, the Southbank Centre’s Artistic Director, called Goldin an artist who “reshaped the language of photography,” adding that presenting her work in the Hayward’s Brutalist spaces would be a moment of pride for the institution.
Goldin’s last U.K. institutional exhibition was “The Devil’s Playground,” a large-scale European traveling retrospective that opened at Whitechapel Gallery in 2002. More recently, in 2025, her best-known series, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” made its U.K. debut at Gagosian in London. The Hayward show now places that history in a new frame, returning Goldin’s work to a public institution at a moment when questions of intimacy, visibility, and political witness remain sharply current.
