For Now

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. 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 today's crises.”

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

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. 

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. 

This text begins with the mishearing of a word. It starts from the place of inconvenience and unravels a hearing not contained within one fixed conversation. A hearing that has been expanded into a writing that begins in your bank and extends to your throat when its language heard writes itself into and onto the muscles.

It begins in your bank and extends to your throat ruminates on how digital algorithms turn words into capital, disciplining language and the body. Its writing explores how search engines link profitability to vocabularies and how productivity dictates posture, raising whether we can separate language and our bodies from economic structures.

IONE is a Dream Keeper: a facilitator of dreams. Sharing this intimate part of our being, she believes, can be the start of new ways of being with one another. 

Exploring the reality of the dream and the dream of reality over many decades has led IONE to appreciate the quantum nature of dreams. Weaving science and dream traditions from around the world together with her own memories and the dreams of her friends and community members, Quantum Dreaming shows that as we start practising awareness, our consciousness also deepens.

IONE and Pauline Oliveros’s shared vision of a harmonious, self-sustaining network of artists and dreamers led to the founding of the Deep Listening Institute. Quantum Dreaming similarly seeks a radical shift in our collective consciousness, across all states of dreaming and waking.

Afterword by Sarah Shin
Images by Sammy Lee

A collection of Philippa Snow's most celebrated writings, articulating with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art.
Snow Business marks Philippa Snow's emergence as one of the twenty-first century's greatest cultural critics. From the 2000s into the 2010s, reality television and "second-screen media," designed to play in the background while we look at phones, have proliferated, inaugurating the dumbient age. Celebrities have never been more ordinary; there have never been so many ordinary people who are celebrities.

A collection of her writing from the last half-decade, Snow Business articulates with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art. The memoirs of Pamela Anderson and the Kardashian sisters are just as worthy exemplars of "autofiction" as the writing of Olivia Laing and Annie Ernaux; Spring Breakers has succeeded in updating The Great Gatsby; and we are still afraid of Francis Bacon.

Snow has no interest in distinctions of high and low culture. If masterpieces of fiction, painting and cinema reflect back to us some vital and mysterious part of ourselves, mass-distributed popular culture does the same thing, and often with greater clarity and violence—if we are only brave enough to look. Fortunately, Snow does the looking for us.

Alongside her essays are also works of fiction, vignettes whose protagonists are actors, singers, child stars. These are strange, sometimes conspiratorial, and often nightmarish. Just as Snow Business can describe culture with stunning clarity, it can inhabit culture's moving parts, making it again something indescribable, a sensuous vision, a complete fever dream.

Philippa Snow is a writer whose work has redefined contemporary criticism through her analysis of popular culture, art, and media. Her work regularly appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, The New Republic, The Nation, The White Review, and the Financial Times. She is the author of Which As You Know Means Violence (Repeater, 2022), Trophy Lives (Mack, 2024), and It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me (Virago, 2025). Through her keen examination of reality television, celebrity culture, and high art, Snow illuminates the increasingly blurred boundaries between popular entertainment and artistic expression in the twenty-first century.