Michelle Handelman

BloodSisters

Michelle Handelman

Tala Brandeis, Pat Califia

From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, Bloodsisters is an A–Z documentary guide that takes an in-depth look at the San Francisco Leatherdyke scene during the mid-nineties.

Homophobia Is Known To Cause Nightmares

Michelle Handelman

A woman imitating a man, imitating himself. Using the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, I edited this film using experimental out-takes and guided purely by intuition. The film sat around for a year without a soundtrack. Then, due to a homophobic incident, I plotted my revenge, locked myself in a sound booth and let loose. A revenge film that will have you falling out of your seat.

These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves

Michelle Handelman

Michelle Handelman’s new work, THESE UNRULY AND UNGOVERNABLE SELVES (2020), recontextualizes characters from her 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, and Walter Benjamin's writings on identifying the difference between threshold 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.

Twists in the Cord (or) … Other Extensions of the Telephone

Lynn Hershman Leeson

R.U. Sirius, Lynn Hershman Leeson

This docudrama presents the history of the telephone, updated and told from the point of view of a character who uses the screen as both a connection to intimacy and a condom for safe sex.

Claiming the Liminal Space

Michelle Handelman

Michelle Handelman: These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves includes the artist’s new video trilogy, The Pandemic Series (2020-2021). This series is comprised of These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves (The Lockdown); Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (The Uprising); and Claiming The Liminal Space (The Aftermath), which was recently completed and is debuting on MMoCA’s website.

Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression

Michelle Handelman

Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (2020) is a continuation of the project These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves which I started at the beginning of the pandemic. It recontextualizes characters from my previous works into hypnotic visual essays about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. "As lockdown continues, and fear of the pandemic gives way to the rage of the political uprising, it’s become crucial to read this moment from a perspective of racial inequality and capitalist fascist oppression. In the words of critical theorist Jill Casid, “May none of us rest as we live our dying. May we not forget but actually do the work of reckoning with the still uncounted, of the crimes of the endless war we are still in.”