Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness, 2019.
Lou Lou Sainsbury & Kari Rosenfeld, The Law of Desire is Fascist, 2022.
Jamila Prowse, Flare: the muted outline of a body in bed as a camera flash overtakes the scene, 2025.
Sick Notes: Anne Boyer
This is an evening dedicated to Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Anne Boyer and her blistering memoir, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness (2019). In her keynote lecture, Boyer discussed the book, which reflects on her experience of breast cancer while deconstructing the gendered, capitalistic regimes that shape cancer treatment and patient experience, bridging a poetics of pain with steely critique.
The talk was followed by a Q&A and preceded by a screening of Jamila Prowse’s new video work Flare: the muted outline of a body in bed as a camera flash overtakes the scene (2025), and Lou Lou Sainsbury and Kari Rosenfeld’s film The Law of Desire is Fascist (2022), along with a reading session of The Undying led by the Feminist Duration Reading Group.
- Feminist Duration Reading Group: 4–6pm
- Screenings: 6.30–7pm
- Anne Boyer Keynote: 7.15–8.30pm
Prowse’s film reflects on life lived from bed during periods of illness, combining diaristic narration, poetic audio description, and creative captioning. The work shares intimate moments of disability flare-up, challenging norms of visibility, productivity, and respectability. Prowse’s approach draws from Black feminist and crip scholarship to explore the entanglements of loss, care, and radical hope.
Sainsbury and Rosenfeld’s film offers a sonic and bodily descent into a world of pharmacological disobedience and spiritual subversion. Part lament, part confession, the work complicates gender, desire, and religious narrative through a speculative lens, narrated by poet Jo Mariner. Sainsbury’s practice traces trans-feminized and queer lives through collaborative study and storytelling, attending to histories of resistance, medicalisation, and survival. Rosenfeld’s work engages with questions of ontology, affect, and belief, rooted in religious and mythological narratives to explore attachment and collective intimacy.
The Feminist Duration Reading Group, currently in residence at the Goldsmiths CCA, is a long-term project dedicated to exploring feminisms with a focus on lesser-known and unacknowledged texts, often from outside the Anglo-American canon or of an experimental nature. Meeting monthly since 2015, the group cultivates a collective, slow reading practice attentive to the temporalities of feminist thought, translation, and transmission.
Sick Notes is an ongoing event series which centres on ill health as a category of experience that provokes diverse linguistic and visual forms. It explores these as critical tools for access, facilitating the translation of liminal and non-normative bodily and mental states. It platforms art works and literary projects as vital in forming the basis for collectivity and activism, challenging the structural conditions that govern illness. Curated by Natasha Hoare and Mariana Lemos.
Supported by the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.
*The reading session is an intimate event with limited capacity. Please make sure to select both “Reading Session” and “Screening & Keynote” tickets if you would like to attend both.
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ACCESS
– Live captioning will be provided for Anne Boyer’s talk.
– All films include subtitles as part of the work’s integrated access design.
– Please note that the Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDRG) session does not have formal access support in place.
– The galleries are wheelchair accessible.
We are keen to support visitors with any specific requirements regarding their attendance. If you would like to request assistance or discuss access, contact the CCA office; goldsmithscca@gold.ac.uk
BIOGRAPHIES
Anne Boyer (b. 1973, Topeka, Kansas) is a poet and essayist based in Scotland. Her writing explores illness, care, labour, and the politics of literature, often drawing from her lived experience of disability and precarity. Working across poetry, essay, and translation, Boyer’s work is attentive to the entanglements of vulnerability, resistance, and survival.
Following her diagnosis with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2014, Boyer began writing on the politics of care, medicine, and mortality. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Undying (2019) reflects on the experience of illness under late capitalism, combining memoir, theory, and poetic inquiry. She is also the author of Garments Against Women (2015), Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018), My Common Heart (2011), and The Romance of Happy Workers (2006), among others.
Her work has been widely translated, including into Spanish, Persian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Turkish, and she has co-translated 20th-century Venezuelan poetry with Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig. Boyer’s honours include the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry (2018), the Whiting Award (2018), and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (2020). She is currently a professor at the University of St Andrews.
Jamila Prowse (b. 1992, London) is an artist and writer based in the UK. Her practice is rooted in curiosity and a desire to understand herself through making, informed by her lived experience of disability, mixed-race ancestry, and the loss of her father at a young age. Working across moving image, painting, photography, textiles, and performance, her research-led approach draws on Black feminist and crip scholarship, and is shaped by her ongoing involvement in contemporary disabled artistic communities.
Her work has been shown at TULCA Visual Arts Festival (Galway), Ormston House (Limerick), Somerset House, South London Gallery, Studio Voltaire (London), and Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen). Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Art Monthly, and the British Journal of Photography, among others.
Lou Lou Sainsbury (b. 1994, London) is an artist based between Rotterdam, Netherlands, and London, UK. Working across moving image, live performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture, and textiles, her work explores histories of resistance, transformation, and entanglement. Collaboration is central to her practice, incorporating rituals, collective study, songwriting, domestic interventions, and makeshift mutations as part of her research. Sainsbury’s work connects spirituality, medicalisation, colonialism, and technology, and seeks to excavate historical and imagined pasts of trans-feminised and queer life within broken human and more-than-human worlds.
Recent solo exhibitions include Ehrlich Steinberg (Los Angeles, 2024), Roodkapje (Rotterdam, 2023), Gasworks (London, 2022), Humber Street Gallery (Hull, 2022), and Well Projects (Margate, 2020). She has exhibited and screened internationally, including at Rencontres Internationales (Paris and Berlin), Tate Modern (London), Chapter (Cardiff), Alchemy Film Festival (Hawick), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nottingham Contemporary, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), and Yaby (Madrid). She is a recipient of awards from the Mondriaan Fonds (2023 and 2025) and the Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme (2021–2023).
Kari Rosenfeld (b. Houston, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Berlin, Germany.
Mariana Lemos (b. 1991, Lisbon) is an independent curator based in London, UK. Her practice centres on performance, affect, queer/feminist/crip posthumanisms, and the politics of illness and disability. She approaches curating through public programming, accessibility, and feminist methodologies, with a particular interest in end-of-the-world narratives and the role of negativity and the abject in queer and feminist art.
Recent curatorial projects include A Tragical Romance at Wonnerth Dejaco for Curated By Festival (Vienna, 2024); Vaivém by Francisca Pinto at Ostra (Lisbon, 2024); DIG IN by Maisie Maris & Laura Mallows at Staffordshire St (London, 2023); INSOMNIA by Leah Clements at South Kiosk (London, 2022–2023). Her writing appears on Frieze, Art Review, Mousse, and Flash Art.
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