Join us for a conversation between A.L. Steiner and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi on the collaborative curatorial processes involved in the creation of Textdemic, a publication born from Steiner’s 2021 program “A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer” at Dia Chelsea as part of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series. Steiner along with Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles, and Pamela Sneed responded to Jenny Holzer’s Laments in Dia’s first in-person program after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments features transcriptions of the poems, lectures and performances from this memorial program. The book’s publisher and designer, Be Oakley of GenderFail, pays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by Dia Art Foundation.

In her afterword, Guidelli-Guidi of the Dia Art Foundation and organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series writes: “Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as ‘voices of the dead,’ a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament the crises of today.”