Nan Goldin, Louise Bourgeois & Destruction of the Father

Narrator

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a slideshow of hundreds of photographs taken by American artist Nan Goldin. Bathed in reddish light, we see Goldin and her friends at parties, in clubs, in the bathroom or in bedrooms.

Elin-Therese Aarseth

In the photographs, intimate moments of bliss and ecstasy are shared. But we also see pain, and the abuse of both love and various substances.

Narrator

This is Elin-Therese Aarseth, art historian at the National Museum.

Elin-Therese Aarseth

Many of the pictures also depict the AIDS epidemic through Goldin's eyes. She herself says that Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary she lets people read.

In 1982, Louise Bourgeois also created a slideshow of family photographs in the form of a picture diary she called it Partial Recall. For 15 minutes, she shares big and small memories and anecdotes from her childhood and her family members. This is also the first time she openly talks about her trauma from growing up; about how she felt let down by her father, who began a relationship with Sadie, and Sadie was the family's English teacher.

Narrator

Bourgeois's work is educational in form compared to Goldin's seductive photographs, but they both share the will to confess, to make visible their own subjective and personal experiences, and turn them into art.