Kandis Williams & manuel arturo abreu
Yale Union and home school present a conversation with Kandis Williams & manuel arturo abreu streamed via Yale Union’s Twitch on July 3 at 4pm PDT. The conversation is in the spirit of extemporaneous theorization and casual rigor, rather than involving anything pre-planned.
This event is part of a series of events programmed in the wake of the postponement of the exhibition Sometimes when birds make sounds, it feels like the sounds are coming out of me due to COVID-19.
Texts read by Kandis and manuel during the talk:
The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, by Robin Waterfield
Word and Object, by Willard Van Orman Quine
poems by manuel arturo abreu
Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97, by Heike Behrend
Tradition, the Writer, and Society, by Wilson Harris
Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, by Eva Illouz
Is the Face a Screen?, by manuel arturo abreu
The Delayed Present: Media-Induced Tempor(e)alities & Techno-traumatic Irritations of “the Contemporary”, by Wolfgang Ernst
poem by Simone White
poem by Aída Cartagena Portalatín
poem by Jay Wright
Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, by Clyde Woods
Part 1
Part 2
The Cassandra Reader on Water and Power in California
Kandis Williams (b. 1985, Baltimore, Maryland) is a conceptual artist based in LA and Berlin. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. She works in collage, performance, publishing, curating, and writing. In 2016 she co-founded Cassandra, a publishing project which produces lo-fi activist and academic texts, flyers, posters, pamphlets, and long-form readers.
Williams’ dense, charged collages can act as staging grounds for work in other media exploring refracting issues. Williams describes the collages’ imagery as a disintegration of photographic value into layered schematics. Drawing on her dance studies, Williams’ performance practice explores how coded social geographies embody socioeconomic and cultural structurality; slices of texts become collages that make up scripts for performers in a process Williams calls experimental pedagogy, a “consumption of academic texts that has a non-discursive output, an affective output that mythifies—weaving what kinds of knowledge are immediately relatable to an individual with the creation of a paradigm of thought.” This embodied pedagogical practice refracts in the Black punk aesthetics of the Cassandra readers, which approach publication as networked collage.
Kandis Williams has had recent solo shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Printed Matter, New York, NY; SADE, Los Angeles; St. Charles Projects, Baltimore, MD; and Works on Paper, Vienna, Austria, among others; she has an upcoming solo show at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Recent performances include “Eurydice” at Gesu Cathedral, Montréal; “A Woman’s Work” at MoMA, New York; and iterations of her ongoing performance series “Eurydice” at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, and NAVEL LA, a project which was profiled in Artforum in March 2020. Recent and upcoming group exhibitions include the Frye Museum, Seattle; The Studio Museum, Harlem; The Underground Museum, Los Angeles; the Wignall Museum of Art, Rancho Cucamonga, CA; the Hammer Museum and the Huntington Gardens and Libraries, Los Angeles; Neu West and 68 Projects, Berlin; and The Breeder, Athens, Greece.
Cassandra press is an artist run publishing and educational platform that produces lo-fi printed matter, classrooms, projects, artist books, and exhibitions. They spread ideas, distribute new language, propagate dialogue centering ethics, aesthetics, femme driven activism, and Black scholarship because y’all ain’t listening. Cassandra Press is run by editor and founder Kandis Williams and Amelian Kashiro Hamilton, founder of Sisters with Invoices. Philosopher Taylor Doran is chief curator of the Artist Editions. Cassandra operates out of Los Angeles, CA.