The Romance of the Sick Rose
Readings and live music with Daisy Lafarge, Rouzbeh Shadpey and Lucy Duncan.
Join us in the galleries for an afternoon of poetry, reading and music with writers and artists Daisy Lafarge and Rouzbeh Shadpey, and musician Lucy Duncan. Lafarge will talk about her work and read selections from her pamphlet of new poems, The Romance of the Sick Rose, which is part of the exhibition, We Contain Multitudes. Shadpey will read from his work and Duncan will perform musical pieces in dialogue with Lafarge’s work.
Daisy Lafarge
Daisy Lafarge is a writer based in Glasgow. She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021), which won a Betty Trask Award, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. Lovebug, a book on the poetics of infection, was published by Peninsula in 2023. Daisy’s writing on ecology, disability, art and literature has been widely published, appearing in Granta, Frieze, the Financial Times and elsewhere. Daisy studied at Edinburgh College of Art before completing a PhD at the University of Glasgow, and her visual work has been exhibited at Tate St Ives, Talbot Rice Gallery, Serpentine Galleries' online programme, and twice acquired by the University of Edinburgh Art Collection. Her second novel is forthcoming in 2027.
Lucy Duncan
Lucy Duncan is a singer, composer and performer based between London and Hastings. In the guise of Luki she explores the far reaches of her voice through textured, character-led songs that ‘create a sense of time and place out of joint' (Stewart Smith, The List). She composed new work for Sung-Im Her’s ‘1 Degree Celcius’ at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank (2025). Her upcoming album ‘Half True’ will be released this year on Staying Out Records (2026).
Rouzbeh Shadpey
Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician with a doctorate in medicine and indefatigable fatigue. He has exhibited and performed at TULCA (Ireland), documenta fifteen (Germany), The Mosaic Rooms (UK), Poetry Project (New York), and MUTEK (Montréal). His writing appears in Parapraxis, Lateral, Decolonial Hacker, and Momus. His musical practice (formerly under the name GOLPESAR) combines avant-garde electronics, guitar, spoken word, and Iranian sonics. He was a 2025 resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie and currently lives in the Netherlands.
