Cassandra Troyan is an artist, writer, researcher, and organizer whose work demarcates space for interventions in the spheres of theory, politics, and culture. They are the author of three books: THRONE OF BLOOD (Solar Luxuriance 2013), BLACKEN ME BLACKEN ME, GROWLED (Tiny Hardcore Press 2014/Civil Coping Mechanisms 2016), KILL MANUAL (Artifice Books 2014) and two chapbooks, HATRED OF WOMEN (Solar Luxuriance 2014) and A THEORY IN TEARS (ANNOTATIONS & CASES FOR FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION) (Kenning Editions 2016). Their writing or interviews have appeared in The New Inquiry, Social Text Online, Chicago Review, Entropy Mag, Shifter Magazine, Elderly, ARMED CELL, Full Stop, Tripwire, Splinter Mag, Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and Harriet: The Blog at Poetry Foundation. From 2010-2015 they curated the reading and performance series ARTIFICIAL EAR with numerous friends and collaborators in Chicago, IL where they also received their MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago.
They have presented, performed, or screened their work at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA); The University of Toronto’s “Sex Salon” at the Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years at SUNY-University at Buffalo NY; Capitalism, Crisis and Ideology lecture series at Cardiff University in Cardiff, Wales; Casco: Office for Art, Design & Theory in Utrecht, NL; Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University; Perdu Literary Foundation in Amsterdam, NL; The Poetry Project, NY; Chicago Poets’ Theater Festival, Sussex Poetry Festival in Brighton, UK; Royal Holloway in London, UK; with retrospectives at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY and at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco, CA. In fall of 2016 they were a Writer in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts.
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Undervisning
They teach theory, creative/critical writing practices, and collaborative/performative interventions as a Senior Lecturer and Programme Coordinator for Visual Communication + Change.
Forskning
Their research demarcates spaces for collective experience through the exploration of myths, normative (gender) roles, radical histories of resistance, and cultural influence as a means to re-organizing agency in the disorganization of daily life. Cutting across the spheres of theory, politics, and culture, their practice is informed by and involved with, the aesthetics of resistance, autonomous organizing around issues of community self-defense, mutual aid, and sex worker rights.
Troyan’s writing explores the terror of becoming female amidst the accelerated haze of contemporary culture, deriving pleasure and power from interrogations of submission, violence, queer desire, sex work, horror, and capital. By engaging a practice of radical alterity, Christopher Higgs writes in a review at The Collagist, “The question Throne of Blood seems interested in provoking is not the basic ontological question, 'what does it mean to be,' but rather a more rabidly black and potently nihilistic question: who gives a fuck about being? Or, put in the form of a statement rather than a question: to be is not to be, forget the question.” At Vice, Blake Butler evinces another notion of being in Kill Manual, as “Troyan infects the struggle of the self into a living, breathing language-system, spitting and shrieking and cackling rather than just whining and worshipping, using reality's death threat against itself.”
Publikationer
Konstnärlig output (Övrigt (populärvetenskap, debatt))
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Troyan, C. (2022). To Threaten the Order of the House. Stockholm, RING artspace.
The exhibition, AND now she walks on out / È Uscita, presnted the work of Giulia Essyad and Carmen Ayala Marín. The opening launched RING's second publication, a text intervention and a poem commissioned as part of the exhibition to researcher and writer Cassandra Troyan: "To Threaten the Order of the House."
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Troyan, C. (2022). AND now she walks on out / È Uscita.
The exhibition, AND now she walks on out / È Uscita, presented the work of Giulia Essyad and Carmen Ayala Marín. The opening launched RING's second publication, a text intervention and a poem commissioned as part of the exhibition from artist, researcher, and writer Cassandra Troyan: "To Threaten the Order of the House."
The exhibition starts from a selection of carpets hanging on the walls of K. Jacobssons Inredning & Auktion. Crafted in Iran before the 1979 revolution, they represent naked women in positions of submission or passivity, some carrying remnants of sexualized exoticism. Recently, discussions in the Swedish parliament addressing sex workers' right called upon nationals values to reinstitute criminalization of the practice of sex work. Can we attune to the sound of a violent female body? Revolting, revolutionary aggressive limbs moved by expectations of care and tenderness, infinitely holding brutality?
Hairs falls in meshes, their soft anticlimactic sound, each hair severed, straight cut,
The movement of your fragile wrist as you grab a collar.
Slaps, again, and more, an acid sound against a cheek repeated until it invades your stomach. A knife in a pig, squish.
The clap of your heels on a silent night.
The clamor rising from the street, thousands of womxn walking for the independence of their body.
. - Pritchard, H., Troyan, C. (2021). In the mouth of a polar bear : The undead feeling of the world.
Bok (Övrigt vetenskapligt)
- Troyan, C. (2020). Freedom & Prostitution. Seattle, WA, The Elephants.
- Troyan, C. (2014). Kill Manual. Chicago, Artifice Books.
- Troyan, C. (2014). Blacken me blacken me, growled. Charleston, IL, Tiny Hardcore Press.
- Troyan, C. (2013). Throne of Blood. San Francisco, USA, Solar Luxuriance.
Bok (Övrigt (populärvetenskap, debatt))
- Troyan, C. (2022). Against Capture. London, Birkbeck College, Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC) & University of Surrey.
- Maybury, R., Troyan, C. (2021). Faster Than An Erection. Rome, Wet Satin Press.
Kapitel i bok, del av antologi (Refereegranskat)
- Troyan, C., Pritchard, H. (2022). The Anti Menagerie : Fictions for Interrogating the Supremacy of World-shaping Violence. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices. Punctum Books. 189-214.
Kapitel i bok, del av antologi (Övrigt (populärvetenskap, debatt))
- Troyan, C. (2020). A Generalized Theory of Capture Against its Weight in Gold. Rewilding : an ecopoetic anthology. London, The Crested Tit Collective. 85-92.
Artikel i tidskrift (Refereegranskat)
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Troyan, C. (2022). A New Animal of Pain : Poems by Cassandra Troyan. Portable Gray. 5 (2). 177-185.
Status: Publicerad
Artikel i tidskrift (Övrigt vetenskapligt)
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Troyan, C. (2018). Matriarkat, andra historier och motstånd bortom kvinnoförtryck. Subaltern. II (1-2). 143-152.
Status: Publicerad
Artikel i tidskrift (Övrigt (populärvetenskap, debatt))
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Troyan, C. (2018). from What Remains. Tripwire: A journal of poetics. 14. 157-164.
Status: Publicerad
Artikel, forskningsöversikt (Refereegranskat)
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Troyan, C. (2015). National Veterans Art Museum, Surrealism & War. Chicago review. 59 (1/2). 302-305.
Status: Publicerad
Konferensbidrag (Övrigt vetenskapligt)
- Gonzalez, M., Troyan, C. (2021). Sex Work and Re-housewifization : Reconsidering the Crises of Care Under the COVID-19 Pandemic. Outlines of the Current Capital-Form, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, June 23-25, 2021.
- Troyan, C. (2019). Reclaiming Abolition : Sex Worker Solidarity and Intersectional Organizing. Historical Materialism. Claps of Thunder: Disaster communism, extinction capitalism and how to survive tomorrow : Sixteenth annual conference, Central London, 7-10 November 2019.
- Troyan, C. (2019). My daughter, never more : A visual presentation and intervention into material scenes of engagement/refusal. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices : January 23–25 – Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden.
Övrigt (Övrigt (populärvetenskap, debatt))
- Aouragh, M., Awan, N., Barnard, G., Boudiaf, Y., Gürses, S., et al. (2021). EU Digital COVID Certificates : When governments move fast and break things. Github European eHealth network - EU Digital Covid Certificate.
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Troyan, C. (2021). Untitled, Port Ref: TN2/5336432 (For Fred). SPAM zine & Press.
Poem on website.
. - Troyan, C. (2020). Excerpts from “Freedom And Prostitution”. Homintern.
- Troyan, C. (2019). from Freedom and Prostitution. New Haven, CT, Social Text Collective.