Cassandra Troyan

Cassandra Troyan is a writer, scholar, and ex-artist whose work uses a materialist feminist lens to demarcate space for interventions in the spheres of theory, politics, and culture. They are the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently A Theory in Tears (ANNOTATIONS & CASES FOR FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION) (Kenning Editions 2016), and have presented, performed, or screened their work at venues such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA); New York Art Book Fair at MoMA/PS1; 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; Capitalism, Crisis and Ideology lecture series at Cardiff University; Casco: Office for Art, Design & Theory in Utrecht, NL; Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University; Perdu in Amsterdam, NL with retrospectives at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY and at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco, CA. They live in Kalmar, Sweden and teach as a Senior Lecturer at Linnaeus University in the Department of Design.

Troyan’s work 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.”