American artist and activist Nan Goldin will open a major show at London’s Hayward Gallery this fall, marking her first institutional presentation in the U.K. since 2002. Titled “You Never Did Anything Wrong,” the exhibition will run from November 24, 2026, through March 7, 2027. It will conclude the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year.
Over the past 50 years, Goldin has become one of the most influential photographers of her generation. She’s known for her raw, intimate portraits of addiction, romance, grief, queer life, and friendship. Her diaristic approach to color photography has foregrounded emotional vulnerability.
The Hayward Gallery show will bring together important photographs and slideshow works spanning Goldin’s career. The artist has described her oeuvre as “a record of my life that no one can revise.” Her lens has frequently focused on her own life and her social circle. According to the Southbank Centre, this exhibition will explore Goldin’s evolving commitment to documenting these relationships and communities often excluded from mainstream representation.
This work is closely associated with the artist’s political activism. In recent years, she’s become an outspoken advocate for those affected by the opioid crisis.
“While U.K. audiences may have seen glimpses of Nan’s story, this major exhibition will offer a long overdue institutional-scale immersion into the world of a true revolutionary,” Rachel Thomas, the Hayward Gallery’s Roden Chief Curator, said in a statement. “The Hayward’s show extends an invitation to experience work that is essential for understanding the interconnectedness of personal experience and political action, revealing the human condition in all of its beauty and fragility.”
Mark Ball, the Southbank Centre’s Artistic Director, described Goldin as an artist who “reshaped the language of photography.”
“At the Hayward Gallery, we are thrilled to host her first major U.K. exhibition for over two decades with work that captures the soul of her practice,” Ball said. “To bring her radical vision to our Brutalist spaces is a moment of immense pride, offering our audiences an encounter with an artist who has never looked away.”
Goldin’s last U.K. institutional exhibition was “The Devil’s Playground,” a large-scale European traveling retrospective which opened at Whitechapel Gallery in 2002. In 2025, Goldin’s most famous series, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” made its U.K. debut at Gagosian in London.
