MESSY THINGS: A THINK BANK
July 15 - 20, 2025 Shanghai
CASSANDRA PRESS x ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
Bhenji Ra, Boz Deseo Garden*, Charlotte Zhang*, Christine Tien Wang, Emily Mei-Mei Rose, Eric N. Mack, Joan Kee*, Jodie Yuzhou Sun, John Tain, Kandis Williams, Khloe Swanson, Okwui Okpokwasili*, Onyeka Igwe, Peng Zuqiang*, Sarah Rifky, Tao Leigh Goffe, Wang Tuo, Zhao Gang, Zian Chen, X Zhu-Nowell, 44 Monthly (Fung Junhua, Pan He, and Zoe Meng Jiang), Fung Junhua, Pan He, Zoe Meng Jiang
PARTICIPANTS
*are virtual attendees
THE FORM:
CONFERENCE AS TRANSFERENCE AND COMBUSTION
Messy Things is an unconventional conference. Conceived in partnership between Cassandra Press, founded by artist Kandis Williams in 2016, and X Zhu-Nowell, Director and Chief Curator at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai, this four-day “think bank” operates as a transparent workspace—a live, collective field of study where Black-led inquiry and Afro‑Asian radical imaginaries convene. At Rockbund Art Museum, participants will trace the silent vectors of colonial history—the silences of the merchant, the comfort woman, the enslaved, the indentured, the intellectual—that structure global flows of capital, race, and spiritualism on conceptual, symbolic and material levels.
Eschewing the formality of the conference and the closure of the symposium, Messy Things proposes an unruly, live field of study—a pedagogical fugue grounded in Black study, revolutionary Chinese thought, and diasporic forms of knowing.
The gathering brings together artists, writers, and scholars in an experimental forum of annotation, refusal, reading out loud, writing against, and study-in-common. The think bank resists extractive models of knowledge and instead privileges the mess: contradiction, rupture, incoherence, pleasure, drift.
Against the accelerated flattening of the global art discourse, where diasporic Black study is often tokenized, privatized, or erased, Messy Things unapologetically insists on Black-led intellectual radicalism. As a Cassandra Press-led research initiative, Messy Things invokes the mythological Cassandra—Trojan prophetess of ruin and clarity, cursed to be disbelieved. It is this figure that informs Cassandra Press’s foundational mission: to amplify voices ignored, misread, or erased in dominant cultural and academic canons.
Daily programming includes artist-led sessions, historical workshops, live annotations, informal salons, screenings, and site-responsive wanderings as a form of archival practice. Academic credentials are set aside; instead, participants are encouraged to share work beyond their professional pursuits—personal, intuitive, and responsive materials connected to their practices and the intersections in focus.
The conference will function as a living laboratory, in which participants share equal expertise as themes unfold. In lieu of fixed conclusions, these dialogues will continue in the form of an adaptive publication in the aftermath of the event—a living document in a constant state of flux.
Throughout, participants are invited to dwell in the indeterminate—what theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva might call “thinking at the limit.”
Messy Things is not a lecture series. It is not optimized for productivity, instead it privileges the disorganized, and the interstitial: the minor note, the half-erased diagram, the offhand comment, the citation without closure
THE CONTENT:
BLACK MARXISM; A MOVEMENT EVER SURVEILLED, ITS LITERARY ORIGINS AND THEIR CONTEMPORARY DISCONTENTS
The recent revitalization of interest in the term Afro‑Asia is one concerned primarily with renegotiations of movements of third worldism and political moments of diasporic collapse, political unification, and imagined alliances—like the famed image of W.E.B. Du Bois and Mao Zedong shaking hands in 1959. Yet this photograph, staged by the writer and political figure Guo Moruo, reminds us that we are not merely looking at two political leaders, but at actors within an ongoing cultural imaginary of radical solidarity.
Their connection was, in fact, mediated through Guo as a literary figure rather than a shared political project. What persists from this moment is less a coherent political formation than a complicated topology of transnational radicalism. The aesthetics born of his biography—Du Bois’s narratives of life in exile, his highly researched infographics on Black sociology, alongside Shirley Graham Du Bois’s continuation of Black internationalist work on television and in opera—form core expectations of the imaginaries of political activity for generations after their passing. Mao Zedong’s cultural campaigns—including revolutionary opera, cinema, scientific education, sculpture, and ideological tourism—similarly stage Afro-Asian kinship as a performative gesture in the communist archive. In this light, much of what remains of internationalisms and Black radical solidarities circulates today as cinematic or literary fantasy, fantasies that can obscure the real dynamics of extraction, racialization, and co‑produced anti‑Blackness on global scales.
These pairings reopen questions of McCarthyite erasure and the afterlives of Third-Worldisms, particularly in the wake of the 2020 global pandemic and the concurrent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the cultural imagination, which underscore the uneven attention given to the often-silenced archives of cross-hemispheric solidarity.
These silent spaces are dangerous to unfold, as they threaten to unravel the evidentiary scaffolding of post–civil rights internationalist positivism—a sentimentalism that continues to underwrite the flow of commerce from colonial peripheries to the global metropole they sustain. A host of image cultures, sustained by fantasies of partially recollected radicalities and co-imagined racial tropes, often obscure the ongoing realities of post-revolutionary, neo-colonial formations. These formations depend on silence: the silence of the merchant, the comfort woman, the enslaved, and the indentured—while the intellectual is recast as entertainer.
According to art historian Joan Kee, “thinking about the difficulties posed by the term diaspora prompts reflection on models of belonging not governed by dispersion.” What is lost amid the flows of people, goods, and images? What is structurally erased by colonial schemas and liberal narratives of integration? Messy Things interrogates Afro-Asia precisely through these notions of dispersion, economic and imperial entanglement, and social silence—embracing these tensions as generative frictions and offering a space to reflect on the poetics and fictions of integration, Black radicality, and international solidarities.
THE CONTEXT:
AFRO ASIA INTER INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERSHIP CASSANDRA PRESS X ROCKBUND MUSEUM: Black Study as Global Method
Messy Things is not a standalone event. It is the second collaboration between Kandis Williams and X Zhu-Nowell, following their 2022 convening in Kingston, Jamaica, organized for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as the Asian Cultural Council meeting. This ongoing partnership between Williams and Zhu-Nowell grounds a methodology that fuses ethics and aesthetics—where Black-led inquiry meets Afro‑Asian radical imaginaries through dialogue, popular media, shared grief, artistic friction, and collective study. Together they have constructed a living framework that insists not on multicultural harmony, but on rupture, unknowing, and political feeling.
The conceptual architecture of Messy Things is shaped by Cassandra Press, whose methodology of Black study is grounded in a rigorous intellectual practice centered on collective investigation. Rooted in improvisational, embodied, and experimental pedagogy, this approach refuses institutional legibility through a shared politics of refusal. Here, study is not a precursor to policy or exhibition—it is a life practice. It values the messiness of thought as it unfolds between people: in conversation, in disagreement, and in the margins of texts. This is not study as extraction or neoliberal signaling, but study as being-together, staying with disorder. It insists on opacity, contradiction, and excess, offering no fixed outcomes, but instead proposes a live syllabus: unbound.
Messy Things draws from the Cassandra Classrooms model—a curriculum shaped by proximity, grief, urgency, and shared citation—formats that unsettle dominant epistemologies, amplify under-read thinkers, and hold space for rage, joy, and untranslatability. Adopting this model, the conference program surfaces socio‑historical debris as points of study: poor images, fragmented archives, and performative ruins.
The think bank will include excerpts from the Cassandra Press archive alongside new reader commissions, activated through site-specific installations, reading rooms, and dialog.
Bringing this to Shanghai is not about cultural placement, but about strategic disorientation. In a city where colonial modernity, socialist utopianism, and speculative futurism collide, Messy Things refuses to treat Afro‑Asian solidarity as a nostalgic image or metaphor. Instead, it reads Shanghai as a terrain of epistemic collision, a place where institutional frameworks collapse and new forms of study become possible under pressure. The city’s cultural landscape is increasingly shaped by acceleration, nationalism, and policy-driven globalization. In that context, transnational solidarity is not easily claimed.
Together, Cassandra Press and RAM have developed a methodology that embraces key principles: Provisional Archives—materials that may be partial, damaged, or decontextualized; Unfinished Readings—embracing the impossibility of mastery and the importance of re-reading; Disidentification with Institutionality—refusing the neat containers of academia, exhibition, or nation; and Collectivity Without Consensus—privileging tension and simultaneity over resolution.