Michelle Handelman: DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown)

Michelle Handelman is a visual artist/filmmaker/writer who makes hypnotic moving image installations that push against the boundaries of gender, race and sexuality. Coming up through the years of the AIDS crisis and Culture Wars, Handelman has built a body of work that confronts the things we collectively fear and deny: sex, death, chaos. Handelman is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee and a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has been shown widely in such venues as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; and elsewhere. Her award-winning film BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES AND SADOMASOCHISM (1995) takes an in-depth look at the San Francisco leatherdyke scene during the mid-90s and is recognized as a landmark of queer history.

An artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the appointment of Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Casid is bringing to completion Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005), Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022), and the co-edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the steirischerherbst ’23 in Graz.

Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation on art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States. Soboleva is currently working on a book project titled Friendship as a Way of Art: Queer Identity and Visual Citation, and co-editing (with Svetlana Kitto) the first major publication on the lesbian gallery Trial Balloon. Her writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Ursula Magazine, as well as various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She teaches at the New School and NYU.