NAN GOLDIN

2023-11-11

2024-03-24

Opening

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locations

WINSING ART PLACE

“Photography has always been my way through fear, and taking pictures is like a protective device that gives me a reason to stay there.” — South Godin

Purdue, a pharmaceutical company run by the Sackler Family for a long time, is responsible for the addiction and death of tens of thousands of people in the United States because of its production of the highly addictive opioid painkiller Oschkondin. The Sackler family has made extensive donations to major art museums and arts institutions, many of whose names have appeared in representative or public institutions. In 2017, the group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) launched a series of public protests against the Sackler family, demanding that the family be removed from major art museums and schools, and to stop accepting donations. In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery in London abandoned the Sackler family donation for the first time, while the Tate Gallery, the Guggenheim Museum, the British Museum and the Louvre in Paris were all officially renamed from the museum. The founder of P.A.I.N., was an influential contemporary American photographer, Nam Godin. “I survived the opium drug crisis and escaped unscathed. I came out of the darkness and ran full speed into this world. I was lonely, but I realized I wasn't alone.” That's what Gordon said in the 2018 Art Forum.

Born into a Jewish family in Washington, D.C., in 1953, Godin chose to leave home at the age of 14 in the face of the painful decision of her sister. In 1968, while attending Boston's Sathia Community School, she received her first Pollyella camera and David Armstrong was the first subject she photographed at the time. Beginning in the early 1970s, Godin began taking a series of black and white photographs for Boston's transgender community, followed by her first solo exhibition in 1973. When she graduated from the Tufts Art School in Boston, she moved to New York City to continue photographing her friends and the diversity and culture of the city.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency series was a major work in Godin's career. Her work draws on the academic style of photography at the time, documenting the true look of East Village New York in the 1970s to 1980s, from conversion queens, homosexuality in love or struggling relationships, heterosexual couples, drug addiction and sex, and personal life。

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a series of photographs from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in which “Cookie Laughing, NYC” chronicles the intimate friendship between Godin and his best friend, Cookie Muller. Godin once described her: “I used to think that as long as I shot enough, I wouldn't lose anyone. In my thirteen years of knowing Koch, I took hundreds of pictures for her, and I put this series together so that she would stay with me, but in fact, it made me know how much I had lost.” , from their acquaintance in 1976 until Mullen's death from AIDS in 1989, Godin continued to document the time spent with Muller, making visible the deep relationship between the two; Cupid with His Wings on Fire, Le Louvre is Godin's Scopophilia series beginning in 2010, where she shoots sculptures and paintings exhibited at Louvre Palace, or These images are juxtaposed with her own photography, depicting the connection between desire, body and sex from the past to the present; the exhibition also includes In 2022, Godin participated for the first time in his video work Sirens at the Venice Biennale, which communicates the senses and states of the body and mind through the metaphor of the Greek mythological character Celine, in homage to the black model Danyel Luna. Photography is Godin's medium of proving everything she's been through. Her work about turbulent and fascinating times, her family, her past, also reveals Godin's desire to preserve the meaning of people's lives, giving her the beauty and power she sees in it.

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