NAN GOLDIN The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1992

This legendary visual diary by American artist Nan Goldin captures the life and death of an entire generation - as a slide show with a soundtrack ranging from Maria Callas to The Velvet Underground.

With Nan Goldin's slide show from the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the summer festival presents one of the most important works in the history of photography. In the form of a 45-minute presentation with 694 35mm slides and an accompanying soundtrack, Goldin provides an intimate insight into her personal environment since the late 1970s, from Boston to Berlin. Her protagonists - including the artist herself - are shown in intimate moments of love and loss; they experience pleasure and pain, love and violence, consume drugs, party in nightclubs, take care of their children and experience the devastation and powerlessness caused by AIDS. "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary that I let others read," says the artist, who was born in 1953. "The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It allows me to remember." The moments that this artist of the century has captured here as a memory and expanded on again and again since the first version in 1985 are, in the version of the slide show with soundtrack, among the most powerful visual experiences in the art world; individual images from the Ballad have become iconographically inscribed in the cultural memory of several generations.