Nan Goldin Panorama Bar “This Will Not End Well” Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan

While in London Marina Abramovic is placed in the gallery-as-rave, Tamara Trauermarsch find that in Milan they put Nan Goldin in an airplane hanger, like a can of Bud Light in a 2000s HBO show.

From the raw intimacy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981) and the celebratory portraits of trans identity in The Other Side (1992), to the haunting memories of Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004) and the childlike melancholy of Fire Leap (2010), each piece builds a fragmented autobiography of survival and loss. Later works such as Memory Lost (2019) and Sirens (2019) plunge into addiction and ecstasy, while her most recent You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024) expand Goldin’s vision toward mythology, abstraction, and the eternal cycles of life and death.

That didn't end well.

What we certainly weren’t craving in Milan was yet another slideshow of Nan Goldin’s portfolio. This format applied to her work is now as tasteful as that piece of Brooklyn gum you've chewed for ten minutes. Please note that, in this case, that piece of gum has been passed from mouth to mouth for at least 20 years. Terrifying.

In the same way I ask myself what was I expecting by having sex with a man on the first date, I wonder about my expectations when, at the entrance of the exhibition, the staff asked me to cover my phone's camera with a branded sticker. Was I in seek of a feeling? Was I supposed to walk around feeling proud to have been there? I don’t identify as a third-grader grappling with his first bruises and sexual experiences.

At that point, I wished the stickers were 'egg shell', so that the core of the exhibition would have been seeing everyone walking around scrubbing their phones camera covers like a desperate with a scratch card.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a second date and neither the satisfaction of a single broken eggshell. Both cases, I got a waste of time.

Worried that the exhibition could have been too lukewarm, they designed a route where every series of photographs was enclosed in a huge felt tent. There were at least seven different ones, each in a different colour and with a different soundtrack. They all had one thing in common though: the heat was nearly deadly and only acceptable if the purpose was to host the naked and afraid in the dead of winter. Even though the most naked and afraid probably couldn't have stand the environment either, and I'm not talking about the temperature.

The show's subtitle should’ve been 'Nightmare tents rotation': who on earth feels the need on a weekday afternoon to be trapped in a tiny, dark, sweaty space with tons of art workers? For Christ.

And anyway, Nan’s crusade finding refuge inside Pirelli Hangar is like hosting a punk funeral inside the Vatican.

The irony burns brighter than the spotlights sweating on those felt walls. Watching rebellion get institutionalised never gets any less obscene.

They love to define this kind of exhibitions “dialogue”. Sure, if by dialogue they mean a pointless monologue echoing through a cathedral of good intentions where the staff whisper about activism as if it’s an artisanal cheese: rare, pungent, perfectly aged for the website’s palette. I wonder if the real performance were the enthusiasts cosplaying empathy, in the need to look radical while staying perfectly respectable like a banker in fishnets, or an terrorist with a press release.

And the crowd applauds, amazed that despite being the size of an airplane hanger: the exhibition was conveniently tote-bag sized.

Apart from that, the last stop of this hour of slaloming Berghain-esquely through alt kids and uncool adults was the only one worth it. And that's probably why I couldn't see anything from how crowded it was. Welcome to Panorama Bar.

For those unaware, the infamous Berlin’s club is the happy alternative: they'll make you cover the camera anyway but you get drugs and can fuck behind the corners.

Pick - A - Boo!