Michelle Handelman, DOOMSCROLLING
      MICHELLE HANDELMAN X SHANNON FUNCHESS
      Saturday May 22, 8pm EST / 5pm PST on participantafterdark.art
      Michelle Handelman x Shannon Funchess
      Presented in collaboration with The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)
      This event includes live ASL interpretation by Candace Davider  

 
PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK and PICA present DOOMSCROLLING, a livestream video premiere of Michelle Handelman’s THE PANDEMIC SERIES (2020-2021), with a live collaborative reading and performance between Handelman and musician/performer Shannon Funchess, co- founder of the band Light Asylum.

 
THE PANDEMIC SERIES (2020-2021) recontextualizes characters from Handelman’s previous works into a hypnotic visual essay about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. It takes as its starting point the current coronavirus pandemic and filters it through theorist Jill Casid’s writings on the necrocene, which Casid has described as living and dying on a dying planet; and Walter Benjamin’s writings on the difference between thresholds and boundaries. Handelman's characters, who each have already struggled with existential questions of belonging and fear in her projects DORIAN, A CINEMATIC PERFUME (2009/11), IRMA VEP, THE LAST BREATH (2013/15), and HUSTLERS & EMPIRES (2018) are juxtaposed with found images and texts sourced during the pandemic to take on a new form that both denies and struggles with containment.  

 
Videos and Live Reading by Michelle Handelman 
Live Performance: Shannon Funchess
Livestream/Video Director: Glen Fogel
Technical Director (PICA): Chris Balo
Audio & Video Engineer (NY): Lazar Bozic
Animation: Enrique Maitland