‘These are chilling McCarthyist times’: Nan Goldin on

Her film Sisters, Saints, Sibyls made people flee and pass out when it was first shown. As it’s screened in Britain, the uncompromising artist talks about self-harm, censorship and her sister Barbara

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.