Textdemic: A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments

Through creative nonfiction, poetry, and the printed image, the publication considers the playful and purposeful self-actualization of a bicultural queer identity while navigating grief as a landscape to address themes of (be)longing, futurity, and place. Alongside a collection of their works and research, Abigail Lucien weaves written and visual offerings by fellow Caribbean and queer artists, including works by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Justin Chance, Cielo Felix-Hernandez, Sucking Salt, and Tamara Santibañez, to create an expanded context for their work rooted in friendship and radical love.

Abigail Lucien (b.1992) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator, auntie, lover, and friend. Working in sculpture, literature, and time-based media, Lucien’s practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Past exhibitions include SculptureCenter (NY), MoMA PS1 (NY), Deli Gallery (NY), MAC Panamá (Panamá), Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), UICA (Grand Rapids, MI), and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA). Residencies include Amant Studio & Research Residency (NY), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Madison, ME), the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts (Wrocław, Poland), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), ACRE (Steuben, WI), and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency (Saugatuck, MI).

Lucien has taught as a full-time faculty member and professor in the Department of Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Interdisciplinary Sculpture Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In the fall of 2023, they will join the Department of Art and Art History as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hunter College in NYC. Deli Gallery represents Abigail Lucien.

With her debut chapbook, award-winning author and curator Legacy Russell returns to poetry with her GAY POMPEII, a collection of lyric poems that begin at the end of the world.

Rising out of Russell's 2022-2023 Digital Fellowship for Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, the first long-term, contemporary art programme established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the author and curator explores ash, filth, dirt, and decay, intersectional with the fetishistic mythos of Pompeii and its destruction in 79 CE by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that receives over two million visitors per year to view its archeological excavation. Russell puts the mass voyeurism, sensation, extraction, and loss of Pompeii—a devastating moment frozen in time—to work. In GAY POMPEII, the site becomes a device with which Russell unspools birth, death, genocide, visual culture, and space-time. The title of this compilation underscores the essence and demand of capitalism: to be carefree in the face of looming extinction. Russell's GAY POMPEII is a selfie taken at the edge of catastrophe and a polyphonic elegy.

Legacy Russell (born 1986 in New York City) is a curator and writer. She is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of the experimental arts institution The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell's written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally.

There is no pause without prior exertion, and this issue of the magazine explores rest and all its associated contexts and contradictions. Amidst increasing environmental pollution, a tenuous global political climate, and a performance-oriented society demanding ever greater productivity, the balance between rest and labour becomes skewed. Pausing carries the risk of falling behind, but this risk can be mitigated by knowing when to rest. This issue examines rest as activity and as resistance. It questions how the individual body, in cohesion with a community, can generate weight through relaxation and distribute it. 

Contributors: Asma Ben Slama, Camila Cañeque, Christiane Blattmann, Eileen Myles, Federico Tosi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Hanne Loreck, Hans-Christian Dany, Hyemin Yang, Ingrid Jäger, Jenni Bohn, Jochen Lempert, Julia Schulze Darup, Mariona Berenguer, Matthias Schubert, Mikołaj Sobczak, Mirene Arsanios, Nat Raha, Nicholas Grafia, Niclas Riepshoff, Omar Hahad, Sarah Drath, Stacy Skolnik, Thomas Laprade, Vir Andres Hera

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

From its anatomy and autonomy to its death and diet, this issue focuses on the motif Body and all its meanings, direct and indirect, for instance as in relation to human and non-human bearers of bodies, its inhabitants like bacteria and organs, its social, medical and juridical conditions, its intoxications, chemical processes, traumas, transitions, well-being, replacements, weaknesses, and its opposites.

Contributors: Adam Dickinson, Andrea Éva Győri, A.L. Steiner, Alexandra Ivanciu, Barak Zemer, Bernhard Willhelm, Clara Lena Langenbach, Clémentine Bedos, Constance DeJong, Daisy Hildyard, Fanny Howe, Hanne Loreck, Hasti, Holly Hunter, Ingrid Jäger, Jannis Marwitz, Jess Arndt, Johannes Kuczera, Jolanta Nowaczyk, Henriette Maier, Mag Gabbert, Maja Smrekar, Manuel Vason, R.I.P. Germain, Rebekka Endler, Sonja Yakovleva 

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

“Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” — McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” — Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” — Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” — Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland

A special issue focused on performance writing, with work by Tanya Lukin Linklater (with Michael Nardone), Jibade-Khalil Huffman & Simone White, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Claudina Domingo (trans. Ryan Greene), Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Walker, Liz Knox, Rona Lorimer, Léo Richard, & Hector Uniacke, Mohamed A. Gawad & Dalia Neis, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Teddy Yoshikami, interviewed by Michelle N. Huang, Kyoo Lee and Jocelyn Saidenberg, Adriana Garriga-López, Gabrielle Civil, plus a Kevin Killian Tribute, with Eileen Myles * Scott Hewicker * Cliff Hengst * Karla Milosevich * Craig Goodman * Michelle Rollman * Anne McGuire * Wayne Smith * Tanya Hollis * Steve Orth * Lindsey Boldt * Maxe Crandall * Arnold J. Kemp * Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn * Susan Gevirtz * Laynie Browne * Patrick Durgin * Norma Cole * Jo Giardini. & reviews: Jessica Lopez Lyman & Jocelyn E. Marshall on Gabrielle Civil, alex cruse on Merce Cunningham, Rob Stanton on Anne Boyer, Jack Chelgren on Miyó Vestrini, David Grundy on Stephen Jonas, Virginia Konchan on Sarah Vap.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.

“An aura of legendary prestige surrounds the work of Alejandra Pizarnik,” writes César Aira. Her last collection to be published before her suicide in 1972, A Musical Hell is the first book of poems by Pizarnik to be published in its entirety in the U.S. Pizarnik writes at the edge of poetic impossibility, opening with a blues singer, expanding into silence, and closing into a theater of shadows and songs of the drowned.

This book has been self-published for Latvian artist and poet Jelena Glazova's solo exhibition “Person with the last name Universe” at Riga contemporary art space (July - August 2026).  The exhibition is the artist’s act of feminist guerrilla resistance within the symbolic territory of contemporary phallocracy. The source and central figure of the post-gender universe conjured by Glazova is the Person with the last name Universe, whose creative strategy the artist unpretentiously calls Glazovism. 

Jelena Glazova (Belgium/Latvia) is a poet and multimedia artist who combines visual elements, experimental sound, installation and poetic text in her projects. As an artist, she has participated in international festivals and projects in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey and other countries. Among the most notable exhibitions are "Identification of a Woman" at the Latvian Museum of Photography (2010) and "Elements of a Puzzle" at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (2011). She is the author of four poetry collections. Glazova's poetry has been translated into 12 languages. Since 2012, she has given more than 200 performances in 18 countries. She is the co-founder of two poetry festivals in Riga: "Blood of a Poet" (2014–2016) and "Poetry without Borders" (2017–2022). https://www.jelena-glazova.com/

Narrative/Prose issue, featuring a special section: I was writing, but it was drawing: a Renee Gladman mini-feature with work by Renee Gladman * Earl Jackson, Jr. * Bruna Mori * Alexis Almeida on Renee Gladman & Julie Carr * Lewis Freedman & Vanessa Thill on Renee Gladman & Mirtha Dermisache. as well as work by Isabel Waidner * sissi tax (translated by Joel Scott & Charlotte Theißen) * Susan Hefuna * Mira Mattar * Lital Khaikin * Maryam Madjidi (translated by Ruth Diver) * Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh * Ilse Aichinger (translated by Christian Hawkey & Uljana Wolf) * Bronka Nowicka (translated by Katarzyna Szuster) * Maude Pilon (translated by Simon Brown) * Mehmet Dere * Syd Staiti * Jena Osman * Germán Sierra * Natani Notah * Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer * Robert Glück on Clarice Lispector * Rob Halpern on Bruce Boone & Dennis Cooper *Dylan Byron on/after Bruce Boone * Linda Bakke on Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today * Anna Fidler * Corey Zielinski on Bob Glück & Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-97 * Jackie Kirby on From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice * David W. Pritchard on Kevin Killian * Dale Enggass on Simone White * Allison Cardon on Anne Boyer * Robert Balun on Leslie Kaplan * Marco Antonio Huerta on Omar Pimienta * Allison Grimaldi Donahue on Josué Guébo * Sara Florian on Lasana Sekou * Louis Bury on Allison Cobb * Hugo Gibson on Annie Ernaux.

In Noah Ross's new book THE DOGS, Ross opens the question of authority and possession in what he deems an illicit act of translation. THE DOGS may begin with Herve Guibert's Les Chiens, but through multiple reiterations of translation, Guibert's text ultimately meets Ross to celebrate, among other sources, Marie de France, Teen Wolf, Auden, and Dom Orejudos in establishing a unique pack of hungry werewolves. You know what happens when werewolves get together: the play can get a little rough. THE DOGS empowers these snarls and yips, growls and howls, on the level of the sentence in translation as much as the embodied erotogenic zones of the body.

Writing on the fragmentation of chronic illness, why ‘full access’ isn’t something arts venues should aim for, the complexities of receiving gender-affirming care while living with chronic illness, the realities of constantly having to ration your energy, an interview with musical artist Dead Gowns, abortion access and bodily autonomy, poetry, artwork, book recommendations, and much more.

Essays, features, poetry, art, interviews & more from Vida Adamczewski, A/Bel Andrade, Amy Berkowitz, Khairani Barokka, Jax Bulstrode, Sarah Courville, Jen Deerinwater , Amy Dickinson, Mizy Judah Clifton, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Dead Gowns, Sergey Isakov, Theo LeGro, Elias Lowe, Cathleen Luo, Jameisha Prescod, Olivia Spring, Leigh Sugar, Oriele Steiner, Emerson Whitney, Chantal Wnuk, Caroline Wolff, and Emma Yearwood

SICK is an independent, thoughtful magazine exploring illness and disability, founded & edited by Olivia Spring and designed by Kaiya Waerea. Founded in Norwich, UK in 2019, we are currently based in Maine, USA and London, UK. We typically publish one issue per year.