Multi-channel Video Installation with Live Performance, 2023-2025.
Dimensions & Duration Variable.

DELIRIUM is a multi-channel film installation that explores the making and unmaking of meaning within hierarchical systems of desire and control. It envisages altered states of consciousness as means of resisting capitalist ideals of production, transfiguring the body and altering consciousness through a visceral, cinematic framework that refuses the production of meaning. DELERIUM in its entirety will include four distinct vignettes:

PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown)
PART TWO: EUPHORIA (The Orgy)
PART THREE: CONTROL (The Come Down)
PART FOUR: SLEEP (The Release)

In each section Handelman directs a central performer whose own work excavates the dark and uncomfortable spaces of desire through confrontational aesthetics.

FEATURING: LYDIA LUNCH, CHRISTEENE, M LAMAR, SHANNON FUNCHESS

DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown)
With the first chapter, Handelman gives us a meditation on death, violence, and intimacy, as filtered through the iconic No-Wave performer LYDIA LUNCH who delivers a monologue written by Handelman, inspired by shared writings on grief, the void, and the insatiable death drive. Handelman’s directorial take on Lunch’s evocative voice sees it reduced to prelingual sound — to breath, moans, and grunts. At times, Handelman’s editing stretches and slows Lunch’s voice to the point of erasure, using Lunch’s voice as a tool with which to probe the limits of the word, alienating the intellect from the body to question the authority granted to language itself.

Choreographic interludes directed by New York-based performance duo FLUCT appear on screen as bodily agents working with and against Lunch’s performance. Founded in 2010 by SIGRID LAUREN and MONICA MIRABILE, FlucT directs a cast of six dancers that includes Lauren and Mirabile themselves, assembled in various tableaus displaying bodies in alternating states of pleasure, pain, grief, and release. Through Handelman’s lens, these become visceral cinematic structures of collective intimacy and decay, an intersubjective mesh of embodied grief and delirious psychic states.


“I CRAVE SUBMERGENCE, NOT RELEASE.”
—Lydia Lunch in DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown)

DELIRIUM is an ambitious new project that positions transgression as a necessary state of knowing and unknowing within the brutalizing context of necropolitical violence and collective grief. Working against control, Handelman offers the ungovernable realm of desire over, and against, attainment and closure. Envisaging a visceral transition from one state to another, while pushing against, and pointing out the limits of consciousness.

DELIRIUM is presented as a synchronized multi-channel projection with custom lighting that gets activated by live performances within the gallery space.

Lydia Lunch is an American singer, poet, writer, and actress whose iconoclastic career was spawned by the downtown New York No-Wave scene. Widely known for her confrontational spoken word performances, she founded the short-lived but highly influential early No-Wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks with James Chance in 1976. She has written, directed, and acted in various underground films, working with transgressive filmmakers such as Beth B, Vivienne Dick, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, and Virginie Despentes. She founded the independent label Widowspeak in the mid-1980s, has authored numerous books, and has performed in bands such as Big Sexy Noise and Retrovirus.

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Christeene is a raw spirit of ferocious music, unabashed sexuality, and fiery intimate stank. The Artist has gathered tremendous critical acclaim for her high-octane, radical creative vision that continues to destroy all notions of normality. Her live shows feature inexplicably powerful musical experiences, distressed choreography, macabre scenes involving butt plugs tied to bouquets of balloons being released from the singer’s ass, wardrobes styled from the forgotten scraps of society, and intimate, heated sermons on the state of the world as we know it. Christeene performs live as well as in an impressive collection of music videos with award winning filmmaker PJ Raval, as well as other guest directors.

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M Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becoming called Negrogothic. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at The Rewire Festival in The Hague, Trauma Bar Berlin, Atrium na Žižkově Prague, The Manhattan School of Music, Wellcome Collection London, The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Funkhaus Berlin Germany, The Meet Factory in Prague, among others. Lamar has appeared on television in Orange Is the New Black and What We Do in the Shadows.

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Shannon Funchess is a self-taught, interdisciplinary performance artist and the founder, vocalist, and producer of internationally revered, dark electronic music project Light Asylum. Founded in Brooklyn in 2007, their performances launched the Electroclash scene through underground raves, museums, music festivals and nightclubs. She has been a featured vocalist for artists The Knife, TV on the Radio, Elysia Crampton, among others, and has supported bands such as LCD Soundsystem, Clan of Xymox, Peaches, TR/ST, in international tours, along with performing live with electronic music pioneer Laurie Anderson.

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FlucT (est. 2010; New York, NY) is the collaborative work of Sigrid Lauren & Monica Mirabile, two artists addressing issues of capital obedience in American culture through choreography and performance. They have collaborated with a multitude of artists and musicians (SOPHIE, PicturePlane), and founded Otion Front Studio, a performance and dance space in Brooklyn, NY. Their work has shown at the Guggenheim, The Broad Museum, Miami Art Basel, SIGNAL, Queens Museum and Andrea Rosen Gallery; and reviewed by Art in America, The New York Times, The Fader, and Cura Magazine.

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Additional Performers & Dancers: Aeirrinn Ricks, Kate Williams, Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu, Madison Wada

DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (THE BREAKDOWN)
Directed, Produced and Edited by Michelle Handelman


LYDIA LUNCH SHOOT
Director/Producer: Michelle Handelman
Producer: Lauryn Siegel
Director of Photography: Ed David
Featuring: Lydia Lunch
Additional Performer: Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu
Assistant to Director/Producer: Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu
Assistant Camera: Paulina Dabrowska
Additional Camera: Lauryn Siegel
Gaffer: Eric Hora
Lighting Design: Wildblur Studio, Kai Sundermann, Aran Atsuo
Special Effects Makeup: Caroline J. Mills
Location Sound Recordist: Wil Masisak
Still Photographer: Laure Leber
Production Assistants: Emil Scanlan, Vic Azarkina, Camilo Calderon,
Jackson Mooney, Carson Quilitzsch


FLUCT SHOOT
Director/Producer: Michelle Handelman
Producer: Lauryn Siegel
Director of Photography: Ed David
Choreographers: FlucT, Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile
Dancers: Sigrid Lauren, Monica Mirabile, Aeirrinn Ricks, Kate Williams, Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu, Madison Wada
Assistant to Director/Producer: Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu
Assistant Camera: Logan Quarles, Summer Siera
Additional Camera: Camilo Calderon, Lauryn Siegel
Lighting: Matthew Deinhart
Stagehand: Noah Mourra
Hair and Makeup: Nina Carelli
Hair and Makeup Assistant: Haydyn Lazarus
Stylist: Hannah Leeke
Set Construction: Joseph Silovsky, Silovsky Studios, Brooklyn
Still Photographer: Laure Leber
Production Assistants: Emil Scanlan, Mike Gawronski, Liam Hickey, AJ Lane

Sound Design: Quentin Chiappetta and Michelle Handelman
Sound Mix: Quentin Chiappetta, Media Noise, NYC
Music: Jack Dangers, Pharmakon
Colorist: Tristan Kneschke

Shot on location at Be Electric Studios, Brooklyn and Performance Space New York, NYC

Special Thanks: Lia Gangitano, Participant Inc, NYC; Pati Hertling, Ana Be Sepulveda, and Andy Sowers at Performance Space New York, NYC; Angela Mattox, Creative Capital; Purple Passion/DV8, NYC, Ziptie Jewelry, Slovenia; Jill Casid, Margaret Chardiet, Glen Fogel, Collin Leitch, Laura Parnes, Tom Garretson.

Supported by Creative Capital