SHANGHAI.- Messy Things is an unconventional conference co-developed by Kandis Williams (artist and founder of publishers Cassandra Press) and X Zhu-Nowell (Director and Chief Curator, Rockbund Art Museum). This four-day “think bank” operates as a transparent workspace—a collective field of study, a pedagogical fugue grounded in Black study, revolutionary Chinese thought, and diasporic forms of knowledge. Hosted by the Rockbund Art Museum and taking place in different sites in Shanghai and nearby towns, Messy Things will enable participants to trace the silent vectors of colonial history—the silences of the merchant, the comfort woman, the enslaved, the indentured, the intellectual—which structure global flows of capital, race, and spiritualism on conceptual, symbolic and material levels.
Hosting this historical gathering in 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.
Eschewing the formality of a symposium or lecture series, Messy Things is a gathering that convenes artists, writers, and scholars in an experimental forum of annotation, refusal, reading aloud, writing against, and study-in-common. This “think bank” resists extractive models of knowledge, instead privileging the mess over multicultural harmony, and moving towards rupture, unknowing, political feeling, contradiction, incoherence, pleasure and drift. Messy Things 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. Together they have constructed a living framework that insists on challenging the terms by which diasporic narratives are flattened within institutions.
This second iteration of their collaboration, Messy Things focuses on the recent revitalization of interest in the term Afro‑Asia, exploring renegotiations of Third Worldism and the political moments of diasporic collapse, political unification, and imagined alliances, such as the iconic image of W.E.B. Du Bois and Mao Zedong shaking hands in 1959. This photograph, staged by 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. We take these socio-political stagings as a starting point—embracing these tensions as generative frictions, offering a space to reflect on the poetics and fictions and fantasies of Black radicality, its integration international solidarities, and economic and imperial entanglements. As art historian Joan Kee notes, “Thinking about the difficulties posed by the term diaspora prompts reflection on models of belonging not governed by dispersion.”
While Black studies are often tokenized, privatized, or erased—Messy Things insists on Black-led aesthetic and intellectual framings that can both describe and de-rationalize forms of anti-blackness as a dispersion of governance within Institutional spaces. The conceptual architecture of Messy Things is shaped by Cassandra Press, invoking the mythological figure of Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess of ruin and clarity, cursed to be disbelieved. This figure informs Cassandra Press’s foundational mission: to amplify voices ignored, misread, or erased from dominant cultural and academic canons. Cassandra’s methodology fuses ethics and aesthetics—where Black-led inquiry meets radical distributions through dialogue, popular media, shared grief, artistic friction, and collective study. Here, study is not a precursor to policy or exhibition; it is a life practice that values the messiness of thought as it unfolds between people: in conversation, in disagreement, through belief and in the margins of texts. Williams and Nowell’s curation is one that uses the aesthetic terrains of Afro-Asia as a site of opacity, contradiction, and excess, offering no fixed outcomes.
Throughout Messy Things, participants are invited to dwell in the indeterminate—what theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva might call “thinking at the limit.” Messy Things is not optimized for productivity; rather, it privileges the disorganized and the interstitial: the minor note, the half-erased diagram, the off-hand comment, the citation without closure. In lieu of fixed conclusions, these dialogues will continue in the form of an adaptive publication in the aftermath of the event, a container for the being-together and staying with disorder—a document in a constant state of flux.
Participants: X Zhu-Nowell, Kandis Williams, Eric N. Mack, Sarah Rifky, Onyeka Igwe, Christine Wang, Tao Leigh Goffe, Jodie Sun, Emily Mei-Mei Rose, Khloe Swanson, Zian Chen, Wang Tuo, Bhenji Ra, John Tain, Zhao Gang, Joan Kee, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Ato Annan.
