Sick Notes: Anne Boyer

Join us for 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 will discuss 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 will be 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 The Undying led by the Feminist Duration Reading Group. 

Feminist Duration Reading Group: 4-6pm

Screenings: 6:30-7:00pm

Anne Boyer Keynote: 7:15-8:30pm

*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.

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 Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London