PRESS RELEASE
CASSANDRA PRESS: NEW PUBLICATIONS
APRIL 1 – JUNE 27, 2021
LUMA WESTBAU, ZURICH
Luma Westbau in Zurich is pleased to present CASSANDRA PRESS: NEW PUBLICATIONS. This marks the first institutional exhibition documenting the work of the artist-run publishing and educational platform. Luma Westbau now opens to the public as a library showcasing Cassandra Press’s recent work, which includes lo-fi printed matter, classrooms, artist-books, readers, and exhibition projects.
The publishing imprint Cassandra Press was founded by artist Kandis Williams. Williams works in collage, performance, dance, publishing, and curating. Her collages are meticulous, densely layered pieces composed of images culled from magazines and archival texts, placed into an unsettling interplay. Williams founded Cassandra Press to further explore and deconstruct critical theory around race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism, and their intersections with Blackness and Black Diaspora – discursive, ideological and embodied.
Across a range of methodologies, Cassandra Press approaches questions of access and power as they appear in aesthetic, discursive, and semiotic registers, exposing unresolved paradoxes and legacies of violence in the foundations of scopic regimes. Named after the mythological Trojan princess whose prophetic visions were never believed, Cassandra Press draws an analogy to the ignored status of radical Black femme scholarship, at once hyper-signalled and perpetually unheard. Responding to what Williams describes the “embodied marginality” of Black women – who are denied hermeneutic and epistemic validation despite being exploited within sectors of labor, entertainment, sexuality, and affective registers – Cassandra Press puts forward a critical apparatus centered around Black scholarship.
As a publishing and educational platform, Cassandra produces publications, events, and classrooms, initiating dialogue from a constellation of topics including plants and migration, fetishism, horror, and the libidinal economy. The imprint is known for its lo-fi readers who compile Xeroxed academic and literary texts, with recent titles including Re: Black Twitter; Cannibalism, Blackface and Minstrelsy; Faucets: The School to Prison Pipeline; and Porn and Power in California. Beyond its printed matter, the press offers virtual workshop courses with artists and academics intended to propagate new critical frameworks and demystify dynamics of institutional oppression. In 2020, the press began offering legal documents designed to protect Black artistic and intellectual producers from commercial and creative exploitation. In Summer 2020, the CASSANDRA CLASSROOMS kicked off, featuring collaborations with artists, writers, scholars and thinkers. Concurrent to this exhibition is the start of the Spring 2021 courses, administered as a residency with the LA- based Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW).
For this exhibition, Luma Westbau presents the complete library of Cassandra Press’ 31 readers, including nine volumes released in March 2021. Presented within the Luma Westbau’s oblique shelving units, designed by the Berlin-based art and architecture venue Program, the installation implicates architecture among the structures facilitating and obstructing the dissemination of knowledge. Displayed alongside the Cassandra readers are a selection of collages drawn from Williams’ past investigations. Taken together, CASSANDRA PRESS: NEW PUBLICATIONS highlights the central process of assemblage that can be found across Cassandra’s offerings, which build through an array of textual and cultural materials.
Organised by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.