DELIRIUM – PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) is the latest work of visual artist, filmmaker, and writer Michelle Handelman (2019 Grantee), featuring the iconic No-Wave performer and writer Lydia Lunch alongside choreography by the New York performance duo FlucT.

DELIRIUM – PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) is the first chapter in Handelman’s epic four-part moving image installation DELIRIUM, an inquiry into 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 interrogating desire through a visceral, cinematic framework that refuses the production of meaning.

DELIRIUM in its entirety will unfold over the upcoming years in 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 political disintegration and circuits of desire through confrontational aesthetics.