Whispers, cries and accusing voices. Traumas passed down through the generations, self-harm and suicide – they are all part of Nan Goldin’s Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, a three-screen projection made exactly 20 years ago, now installed in a deconsecrated Welsh chapel in central London. “It is important that it is shown in a church,” Goldin tells me, as we sit together in her apartment in Brooklyn on a spring afternoon.
The story begins like a slide show, telling the story of Saint Barbara by way of a sequence of art-historical images. “They lock her up because of her beliefs,” explains Goldin, “and she manages to rebel and escape and she converts to Christianity and the walls weep and the holy ghost visits her. It’s a great story.” But it ends badly, with Barbara’s beheading at the hands of her father, who is then struck down by a bolt of biblical lightning.
Sisters, Saints, Sibyls takes us from the life and martyrdom of Saint Barbara to the story of Goldin’s older sister, another Barbara, a bright and rebellious child who was sent away to orphanages, reform schools and mental institutions in her early teens, and who killed herself, aged 19, in 1965. Sisters, Saints, Sibyls broaches the subject head-on and goes into the aftermath. Goldin tells the story again as we sit together. It is her origin story and the retelling is never done. Like much of her work, it is autobiography by other means. “I was really ambivalent about the piece for a long time. I thought it was too self-indulgent. But now I love it. I also try to stay away from self-pity.”
Behind us, in a red box on her mantelpiece, sits the Golden Lion from the 2022 Venice film festival, which she and film director Laura Poitras won for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, in which both Goldin’s work and her activism – especially in her demolition of the Sackler family, owners of the pharmaceutical company responsible for much of America’s opioid drug epidemic – is portrayed alongside a wide-ranging commentary on the artist’s work and life. The personal and the political are inextricable in Goldin’s necessary, uncompromising art.
In Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, black-and-white snapshots of seemingly happy families and growing children give way to Goldin’s own photographs of the neat, wooded suburbs in Washington where she grew up, and on to the bleak corridors and orphanage bedrooms, the wretched staircases and locked doors of the places her sister was sent by her parents. Here’s the rank growth beside the railroad tracks, broken trees and a train rushing through.
We see Goldin in rehab at the Priory clinic and the dank English countryside, and the cemetery where her sister lies. Some images are inexplicable. Someone in a chair entirely hidden under a blanket, an abject melting snowman, a buzzard circling in a blank sky. The images keep on coming as the story unfolds. I can’t look away, but some moments are difficult to witness.
“If you can make somebody faint from your work, it doesn’t get better, right?” Goldin says, talking about a sequence of still images of the artist burning her arm with a lit cigarette. More burns run up her flesh, her arm loosely bandaged from an earlier bout of compulsive self-harming. The scene is brief, but since Sisters, Saints, Sibyls was first shown in Paris in 2004 – where people did faint and clamoured to leave at this point – she’s edited it down.
“I cut out two minutes showing me burning myself and I changed the word ‘Negro’ to ‘Black,’” she says. “Which maybe I shouldn’t have because ‘Negro’ was what was written in a psychiatric report about my sister. They thought she’d had a ‘Negro’ boyfriend. I also added that the psychiatrists thought it was my mother, Mrs Goldin, who should have been in the hospital. Working on the film, we unlocked Pandora’s box. My father wrote to the institutions where my sister had been held and got all that material for me, passing it on without reading any of it himself.”
Goldin expands on her troubled family background. “My mother didn’t know what she was getting into. She had no idea. She had been a victim of sexual abuse for years. Her father did nothing to help her. There was all this rabbinical shit – they were very Orthodox Jews. My mother was anorexic. In the 1940s and 50s, when everyone was supposed to have children, a psychiatrist told my parents not to have any.
“My sister must’ve been so traumatised being born into that family and being pushed to be perfect. By the time I wanted to talk to my mother about it all, she already had dementia and didn’t know what I was talking about. She was a very damaged person. Her whole life was my father. He had also grown up in a very Orthodox family, but had given all that up. By the time I was born, he was an atheist.”
Goldin grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood. Forty-four families had got together and built houses at the same time. While making Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, she went back to photograph the house. She said she wanted to breathe the air, but the people who lived there then wouldn’t let her in. The first place her parents had sent her sister was an orphanage. There was also a reform school. Goldin went to them all.
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“The orphanage is where you hear the little girl crying behind a door and the nurse trying to comfort her,” she says. “The sounds are real. They knew we were filming. One of the institutions she was sent to was kind of ritzy, but there were bare mattresses on the floor and locked rooms. It was not a nice place. And that was in 2003. The most tragic thing was that my sister said, ‘I want to go home but I don’t have a home.’”
The real Barbara, Goldin insists, was funny and creative, an accomplished pianist from an early age. “Her criticisms of my mother, of the family and society, were brilliant. She saw the suburbs as a trap. I just wished she could have met the women of the beat generation.”
Some stories are never over. The half-hour, three-screen film is also currently playing in a travelling European retrospective of Goldin’s projected works. Tellingly, it is titled This Will Not End Well. Where does she go from here?
“If I stopped,” she says, “I wouldn’t have anything to do.” She has recently been collecting footage of animals having sex – rabbits, turtles, foxes. She’s intrigued about fish, but has no idea how they reproduce, until I explain. Telling Goldin the facts of life feels absurd. “I’ve been working on a new piece about the eclipse, shot on 16mm. It’ll be the most apolitical work I’ve done.” How do you know? Everything has echoes and everything is political. “I don’t want to be condemned for being political in these times,” she says.
This April, Goldin gave a speech on her acceptance of a lifetime achievement award at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in New York. It contained a blistering attack on the war in Gaza, on censorship, and what it is like to see real-time images of life and death, every day, on Instagram.
“It is so shameful, as a Jewish person,” says Goldin. “I was brought up believing that Jewish people, like me, were exceptional in our kindness and humanity. The genocide in Gaza has affected me so very deeply.” What is there to do, she asks, when Gaza will soon just be a golf course? “These are chilling times of McCarthyism and such effective propaganda by the western media. There is a whole generation of traumatised people in Palestine,” she says, “and of course they are being radicalised by what is happening.”
Sisters, Saints, Sibyls is also about trauma being passed from generation to generation, with all its consequences. It is a chain that’s hard to break. The students here will prevail, she says, but they won’t vote for Joe Biden. Does that mean Donald Trump wins? “It’s not too late to get somebody else on the ticket,” Goldin smiles. “Maybe a little old Jewish lady could do it. That’s an idea.”
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Nan Goldin: Sisters, Saints, Sibyls is at the Welsh Chapel, 83 Charing Cross Road, London, 30 May to 23 June
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In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org