SAT MAY 22, 8pm EST | DOOMSCROLLING | Michelle Handelman x Shannon Funchess livestream

DOOMSCROLLING MICHELLE HANDELMAN x SHANNON FUNCHESS Livestream Video Premiere and Performance Saturday May 22, 8 PM EST / 5PM PST  CLICK HERE to stream participantafterdark.art  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 Perfomance: Shannon Funchess  Livestream/Video Director: Glen Fogel  Technical Director (PICA): Chris Balo  Audio & Video Engineer (NY): Lazar Bozic  Animation: Enrique Maitland  Image: Michelle Handelman, These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves (2020) from The Pandemic Series, single-channel video with sound, 06:07 minutes [a close-cropped letterbox video image of the performer Shannon Funchess wearing gold leather and a black moustache, with white lower-case text overlaid across the image that reads “to be present for the dying;” fluorescent tubes are visible in the otherwise dark background.]  PARTICIPANT INC 253 E. Houston St New York, New York 10002-1023