Loss unfolds slowly. It’s not in the moment or the immediate aftermath that grief leaves its deepest mark on you; as American photographer Nan Goldin’s installation in a central London church proves, loss spreads its pain out over years, decades.

‘Sisters, Saints, Sibyls’ documents the tragic early years of Goldin’s older sister Barbara, who took her own life at age 18. The three screens of the film flick through family snapshots of Barbara as a baby, a young kid, and then a budding teen. Goldin narrates Barbara’s story with a cold detachment, speaking of her rebellion, her struggles with her sexuality, her constant fights with her mother. Barbara was sent to a correctional facility where she self-harmed, then to the National Institute of Mental Health as her relationship with her mother deteriorated, where she eventually got a pass to go home, but took herself to the train tracks instead. It’s a harrowing, turbulent descent into total mental collapse in middle America.

It could have fallen into cloying, syrupy, heart-aching sentimentality – which would have been affecting, but too easy. Instead it takes a grim, unflinching look at the places that Barbara’s memory now haunts, with grainy video footage and still images of these brick buildings that contained her spirit, that tried to mould her and change her, but failed. 

A deeply moving portrayal of grief

But Goldin was moulded and changed by her sister’s suicide. The second half of the film is a mini-biography, tracing Goldin’s uneasy life of freedom, drugs, self-harm and pain in the wake of that tragic act. Photographs document the people of her life, the filthy beds, the institutions, the love, the grief. She’s caught stubbing cigarettes out on her arm, visiting her sister’s grave, living, getting by, but only just. 

It’s not that Goldin is saying the path of her life was entirely defined by her sister’s suicide, it’s that it’s always there, always present, a shadow being permanently cast. The use of music is a little grating (Johnny Cash’s cover of ‘Hurt’ over images of self harm? Yeesh), and some of the film itself can get a bit heavy handed, but it’s a deeply moving portrayal of grief. Here in this chapel on Charing Cross road, in its altar-like configuration, it’s a prayer to women we’ve lost.

Too often, art about injustice or trauma does nothing more than state the fact of its own existence. It says ‘this bad thing happened’ as if the event described is the art itself, it doesn’t do anything to move the event or topic forward. But good art takes that injustice or trauma and reframes it, turns it into something new, something bigger, something somehow more powerful. That’s what Goldin has done; she’s looked at this historic pain in her life, this deep chasm of grief running through her very being, and made it into something beautiful.