#artists publishing

The MoMA Library welcomes the new Instagram account momacontemporaryeditions, which keeps you up to date on this innovative artists’ books publishing program. -jt

Image: Rosângela Rennó (b. 1962, Belo Horizonte). Tudo sobre rodas (Everything on wheels). 2016. Detail of “Photomap” for The Valise

Readers by Kandis Williams & CASSANDRA Press

Artist statement:

Part of a performance and collage based practice, artist Kandis Williams creates ‘Readers’ of scanned, copied, pasted and reproduced texts, and images. The Readers have informed the last years of Kandis Williams’ aesthetic practice and research -the evolution of a long use of xerox toner as a medium and material. The Readers are text based collages that illustrate thematic bouts of research and struggle with philosophical and historical frameworks around social and political phenomenon that run concurrent to William’s image making practice. Chiefly turned on by the re-arrangement and liquidation of photographic contents, Williams willfully subverts the finality and hermetic nature inherent to the image itself (even the collaged image) offering readers as a secondary or supplemental format for a body of visual or performative expressions. The Readers bind texts around her research to narrativize a stream of propositions found around race, class, gender and nationalism in the contemporary world; tracing a subjectivity molded into and out of the socio-cultural and legal expressions of these constructs.

In 2016, CASSANDRA Press was founded as a publishing project by Taylor Doran, Kandis Williams, and Jordan Nassar making lo-fi activist and academic texts, flyers, posters, pamphlets and readers, in hopes of spreading ideas and sharing perspectives, promoting dialogue, and inspiring further and wider-spread political and social activism.The Readers are just one facet of CASSANDRA founded by Williams, Doran, and Nassar who all produce and curate both as a team and independently of each other. CASSANDRA offers a hydra head approach to the content and dissemination of our publications, dedicated to incorporating our practices as artists into our means of discourse, to self-publishing, re-publishing, re-mix-and-publishing, and to telling the truth.

–sh