More than two decades after her last institutional exhibition in the UK, Nan Goldin returns to London with You Never Did Anything Wrong, a major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery that will debut an ambitious new body of moving-image work. Opening as part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary programme, the exhibition will brings together newly commissioned films, photography and slide installations that trace the evolution of one of contemporary art’s most uncompromising voices.

For over fifty years, Goldin has transformed photography into an act of radical intimacy. Her images of lovers, friends and chosen family documented lives often overlooked by mainstream culture, collapsing the distance between photographer and subject with an honesty that reshaped the medium. Love, grief, addiction, desire and survival have long formed the emotional core of her work. Here, however, her gaze shifts beyond the human.

Presented in immersive spaces designed with architect Hala Wardé, the exhibition centres on You Never Did Anything Wrong, a two-part film project that marks a striking new chapter in Goldin’s practice. Making its public debut, Part II (2026) is shown alongside Part I (2024), together exploring the fragile relationship between animals, landscapes and a planet on the edge.

Shot on 16mm film, Part I unfolds around a solar eclipse and draws inspiration from an ancient myth in which animals steal the sun. Entirely absent of human presence, the film invites viewers into an imagined world shaped by animal consciousness.

Created with filmmaker David Sherman, Part II assembles found footage, damaged soundtracks and archival 16mm nature films from the 1960s and 70s into an abstract meditation on the natural world. Accompanied by a new score from Mica Levi, the work gradually transforms from a reflection on inherited ways of seeing animals into a lyrical elegy for disappearing ecosystems, where beauty and extinction exist side by side.

The exhibition also presents the UK premiere of Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a moving-image work that places photographs of Goldin’s friends and lovers alongside masterpieces from museums around the world. Echoing gestures, colours and emotions across centuries, the film suggests that personal histories and art history have always spoken the same emotional language. Set to a score by Soundwalk Collective, it reflects Goldin’s conviction that “my people have always been here.”

Alongside these moving-image works, the Hayward Gallery will present a selection of photographs, including a new series connected to You Never Did Anything Wrong. Together, they reveal an artist whose practice continues to expand while remaining rooted in bearing witness, to love, vulnerability, political resistance and the delicate interdependence of all living beings.

For Southbank Centre Artistic Director Mark Ball, the exhibition reaffirms Goldin’s lasting influence on contemporary photography. More than documenting lives, her work has fundamentally altered the language of the medium, transforming it into an enduring record of intimacy, resilience and social history. Her return to the Hayward Gallery offers British audiences the opportunity to encounter an artist whose vision has never wavered, and whose capacity to confront the complexities of the world remains as urgent as ever.

You Never Did Anything Wrong opens at the Hayward Gallery on 24 November 2026 and runs until 7 March 2027.

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Images: Nan Goldin, Young love, 2024 (detail) © Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian, Nan Goldin, Still from You Never Did Anything Wrong, Part I, 2024. © Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian, Nan Goldin, My horse Roma, outside Luxor, Egypt, 2003 © Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian.