Full-Color Video Compilation Livestream with Live Performance, 2021

Michelle Handelman x Shannon Funchess

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. Doomscrolling originally premiered on After Dark on May 22, 2021.

The Pandemic Series (2020-2021) recontextualizes characters from Michelle’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.