Nan Goldin criticises a gallery’s Israel-Gaza event ahead of her own show

Nan Goldin has publicly distanced herself from an event at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, as she prepares to stage a German iteration of her travelling retrospective, This Will Not End Well, at the gallery. With the artist’s show set to open to the public on November 23, a symposium titled Art and Activism in Times of Polarization – not connected to Goldin’s exhibition – is scheduled for this weekend. However, her statements on the talk have already led some participants to pull out.

Goldin’s pushback against the symposium, which claims to address “anti-Semitism, racism, [and] artistic freedom” amid the “Middle East conflict”, initially came via the activist group Strike Germany. Earlier this month (November 12) Strike Germany called for the event to be cancelled on social media, writing: “This event will be largely dominated by genocide-denying Zionists, while pretending to offer multiple ‘nuanced’ positions. All participants are invited to make the Neue Nationalgalerie look like a safe and reliable cultural institution, as though that were possible in the increasingly hard-line Zionist German state that funds it.”

“it is clear that this symposium is nothing more than a preemptive defence against any critique levelled at the museum’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, for presenting the work of a vocal anti-Zionist like Nan Goldin,” the group’s statement continues. “From the outset, the symposium sidelines the liberation of the Palestinian people and reduces an ongoing genocide to mere ‘polarisation.’”

Over the weekend, Goldin liked Strike Germany’s post via her official Instagram, also leaving a damning public comment. “I want it to be clear that I was not aware of the symposium until an ally sent me the press release, which connected it to my name and my show,” she writes. “I wanted it cancelled from the beginning, but I was only able to divorce my name. It is clear to me that the museum organised this symposium as a prophylactic to secure its position in the German discussion – in other words, to prove they do not support my politics. They knew who they were inviting.”

In Goldin’s response, she also explains that Candice Breitz and Eyal Weizman – who have both been outspoken about the ongoing murder of Palestinian people in Gaza – only agreed to talk at the event out of solidarity with Goldin and her show. She also clarifies that writer Masha Gessen, who has been criticised for pulling out of the symposium multiple times, never officially accepted the gallery’s invitation in the first place.

The Neue Nationalgalerie, in its own statement on the controversy (published November 19), says that the symposium aims to provide “much-needed space for a constructive, long overdue debate”. It also confirms that the symposium was organised independently of the artist and her show, adding: “The museum informed the artist about its plans but did not ask for her permission. Neither the artist nor her work are the subject of discussion. The artist was invited to participate in the symposium but in the process declined to do so, making clear that she disagreed with the event and any association between it and her exhibition. In the current heated atmosphere, the process is challenging for everyone involved.”

According to a short interview with Artnet on the fallout from the planned symposium, Goldin says that she’ll deliver a speech on Friday evening (November 22) at the opening of This Will Not End Well. “I respect that they are allowing me to speak,” she says, “and keeping their promise.”