Lucy is Sick was a talk with artist Roee Rosen in conversation with curator Chen Tamir, held as an online video call. The focus of the talk was Rosen’s seminal works and new project, Lucy is Sick (2020), a coloring book about the effects of illness on the body. The book was commissioned by steirischer herbst to premier at steirischer herbst ’20 – Paranoia TV (2020), and was supported by an Artis Exhibition Grant. Lucy is an enfant terrible hetero-male character that Rosen created nearly thirty years ago. He first appeared in an artist book of poetic texts and pen drawings by Rosen, depicting his encounters and adventures. In Lucy is Sick, the character Lucy resurfaces in a series of surreal literary episodes exploring the experiences and effects of illness at different stages on the body, mind, and relationships. The coloring book was shared with in-patients at University Hospital Graz, Austria during the steirischer herbst festival in 2020, and is the first chapter of a larger literary project by Rosen.

Chen Tamir moderated a conversation with Roee Rosen about Lucy is Sick and other critical works from his expansive and international career as a multidisciplinary artist, novelist, and filmmaker, including Kafka for Kids, an ongoing film project that imagines stories by Kafka as a brutally surreal children’s TV series; The Dust Channel (2016), a video commissioned by Documenta for Documenta 14 (2017) that is an operetta with a libretto in Russian about a British home appliance, a Dyson DC07 Vacuum Cleaner, set in an Israeli reality of private perversion and socio-political phobias; and The Blind Merchant (1989–1991), an artist book and installation, made up of 145 drawings and 151 pages of text, that expands on Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with revisionist, “parasitical” text and drawings, and was recently acquired into the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.