Peggy Ahwesh

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

A quartet of crack addicts in Miami sit around, while outside, the biggest hurricane of the century is about to hit. The Pixelvision camera roams restlessly through the apartment, focusing nervously on the tiniest details, but never staying in any one spot for very long. Meanwhile, the addicts engage in desultory conversation, or make phone calls, or tell stories about their past experiences.

Nocturne is a psychological horror film built on the conflicts of a woman tortured by the ambiguity between reality and illusion, dream and desire. The woman has perhaps murdered her lover and is living in an unstable world when he returns to her at night, in her dreams and into her arms, as witness to the subversive violence of nature, corporeality and desire. (PA)

This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

A mockumentary following the troubled production of Clockmen: The Musical, focusing on a cosplayer-turned-actress who reacts to the stress of the production in a rather unusual way.

A music-filled tour of Christmas good cheer overtakes this gastronomically oriented excursion through the winter season of discontent and yuletime yearnings craving ignition.

A quartet of crack addicts in Miami sit around, while outside, the biggest hurricane of the century is about to hit. The Pixelvision camera roams restlessly through the apartment, focusing nervously on the tiniest details, but never staying in any one spot for very long. Meanwhile, the addicts engage in desultory conversation, or make phone calls, or tell stories about their past experiences.

A quartet of crack addicts in Miami sit around, while outside, the biggest hurricane of the century is about to hit. The Pixelvision camera roams restlessly through the apartment, focusing nervously on the tiniest details, but never staying in any one spot for very long. Meanwhile, the addicts engage in desultory conversation, or make phone calls, or tell stories about their past experiences.

Nocturne is a psychological horror film built on the conflicts of a woman tortured by the ambiguity between reality and illusion, dream and desire. The woman has perhaps murdered her lover and is living in an unstable world when he returns to her at night, in her dreams and into her arms, as witness to the subversive violence of nature, corporeality and desire. (PA)

An edible indelible organic oneiric mushroom movie made for Bradley Eros on his 70th Birthday!

Peggy Ahwesh re-edits and optically prints a Super 8 stag loop, rarifying the degraded images into an abstract stained-glass mosaic. From a clumsy and heavy-handed pornographic film of the seventies that bad storage conditions have deteriorated over time, Peggy Ahwesh uses the alterations and the mold of the film to emphasize the sensuality of the scenes. It produces a newborn, beautiful film, powerful, erotic, and disarming at a time.

Wadena, MN: (population 4,060: town motto “Where the Prairie Meets the Woodands”) was hit by a tornado in June, 2010. “I didn’t need the things I lost,” Cindy said on a windy day on the empty ground where her house used to be. “I didn’t need to hold on to everything."

A film about the socialization process and repression. My footage of family and friends intercut with Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Pasolini’s Pig Sty. Trying to filter the mud of consciousness in the brain of the child, the doomsday prophet and the suburban art collector to extract the socio-political artifacts. I am interested in the working method of both Romero and Pasolini. Their use of non-professionals as actors, the regional dialect of a language, a populist critique of society and a gritty and vulgar realism.

An experimental documentary filmed over a two-year period, NOTES FROM THE LOWER EAST SIDE includes such personalities as Clayton Patterson, performance artist Penny Arcade, Anthology's own Jed Rapfogel, and other amazing HOWL Fest personalities.

A home-movie paean to the Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom plumbs the depths of boudoir small talk. In the first part, a newly-acquainted odd couple discuss desire—and lack thereof—over a bag of potato chips. In the second part, a recumbent woman describes her partner and herself as "the John and Yoko of the '90s." ("We're in bed most of the time," she explains.) The two read aloud, nap and argue beneath the blankets. Ahwesh manipulates the image through chemical and mechanical means, gradually shifting the color scheme from blue to yellow.

From Romance to Ritual invokes and inverts the title of the 1920 book by Jessie L. Weston, as it, like the book, draws connections between pagan history and ritual and mythology.

Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting "the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor." — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader.

Investigates memory and the uncanny through the experience of hypnotized subjects who communicate via a glacial and slow storytelling informed by suggestion and the working of the unconscious. Art is the ape of nature—the imitation, the mirror, the follies of human invention that strive for the divine. Inspired by Herzog’s 'Heart of Glass,' the performers evoke a murky past and foreshadow a dystopic future.

A re-staging of Reich’s question, “Am I a Spaceman?”, at a cloudbuster near his laboratory in Rangeley, Maine. 2) A re-staging of the spaceman’s warning speech to earthlings in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Here the spaceship is replaced by WR’s tomb. - AFA

With Heaven's Gate, Ahwesh employs a strategy similar to that used in 73 Suspect Words: against a blank screen, a metronomic procession of single words unfolds, gradually building into a cool, minimal portrait of the apocalyptic paranoia that runs through the American social body. While 73 Suspect Words appropriated text from the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, aka the "Unabomber," Heaven's Gate takes up words from the Web site of the cult organization of that name, whose beliefs in extraterrestrial contact led to their 1997 mass suicide.

Here Ahwesh's heterogeneous textual approach comes to the fore, as she juxtaposes narrative, faux documentary, comedic and "serious" footage, and merges film, video, and Pixelvision. Suggestions and meanings accumulate: austere, theoretical text is interrupted by shots of women relating bawdy (sexist) jokes; classic R&B music plays while women stomp on records and pour alcohol on the floor. The Vision Machine is a fragmented inquiry into issues of gender, language and representation.

Through original imagery and footage of airplane flights captured within a mid-2000s 3D flight simulation computer game, "The Wayfinders" addresses notions of power, control, lost histories, displacement, and freedom, especially in times of oppression and war. [Overview courtesy of Microscope Gallery]

Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

"This is footage of the famous fountain at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai that I shot in April, 2010 when I was there for the art fair. The song is Amvaj (Waves) by Bijan Mortazavi."

The Fragments Project is personal filmmaking at its most immediate — documents of people in the filmmaker's life. Each "fragment" demands the viewer's involvement on multiple levels. Ahwesh's project becomes a fascinating report on our times and an investigation into the uses of film.

Three short films about the beauty and mystery of the night sky.

Fragments from movies found in an abandoned cinema in Beirut. Retrieved by Mr. Salloum. Assembled by Ms. Ahwesh.

Fragments from movies found in an abandoned cinema in Beirut. Retrieved by Mr. Salloum. Assembled by Ms. Ahwesh.

A document of a 1980 gay wedding at Pittsburgh's Le Cyrk club

Activities at home with Mistress and her naughty pet.

Lara Croft, the virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, is recast as a triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan, and the clone in this work based on appropriated footage from the game Tomb Raider.

Lara Croft, the virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, is recast as a triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan, and the clone in this work based on appropriated footage from the game Tomb Raider.

In this new collaborative work, the legacy of renegade scientist and social thinker Wilhelm Reich gets the musical treatment it has long deserved, thanks to filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Jacqueline Goss, and an ensemble of co-conspirators including composer Zach Layton and performers Cecilia Aldarondo, Laith Ayogu, Lana Lin, Jennifer Montgomery, and Marianne Shaneen, among many others. A student and protégé of Freud’s, and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychotherapy, Reich famously claimed to have discovered orgone, a form of life energy pervading the universe. Shot in his home and laboratory in Rangeley, Maine, OR119 transmutes Reich’s writings into song, while also conjuring into existence a series of impossible encounters between Reich and a selection of contemporary feminist writers. A theoretical musical that’s as playful and liberating as it is formally challenging and intellectually provocative, OR119 is suffused with its own unique artistic life force.

The pandemic era of 2020/2021, I spent most nights outdoors alone transfixed by the theater of the stars and the dance of the fireflies. My sense of time expanded and slowed but the time-lapse camera condenses and speeds up the experience, in seeming contradiction. I waved my arms to trip the neighbors’ motion-sensitive lights to magical effect on the trees in my backyard.

My cat Claude was recovering from a car accident that nearly killed him and I thought it would be interesting to have his aura read. I wanted to see how he was feeling psychically and test for trauma or unhappiness. Fortunately, the cat seemed to be fine and pretty healthy.

The summer of 2020 I spent most nights outdoors alone transfixed by the theater of the stars and the dance of the fireflies. My sense of time expanded and slowed but the time-lapse camera condenses and speeds up the experience, in seeming contradiction. I waved my arms to trip the neighbors’ motion-sensitive lights to magical effect on the trees in my backyard.

Caldwell's pulp storytelling, proto-feminist stance and unabashed social dramatization of his characters are a distinct vision of the condition of women -- specifically working class women. His broadly drawn themes of small town hypocrisy and restrictive moral values contextualize the titular characters' struggle for sexual expression, stability and independence. Certain Women is a disconcerting parable that pays tribute to but also defies the 50s period style of Caldwell, opting for contemporary small town situations and cinematic style. This cautionary tale of four heroic yet ordinary women is fashioned out of the past but relies on observations of the present historical moment and its political reality.

A short and inconclusive treatise on women and gambling. The allure of risk taking, the contradictions of excessive behavior and a penchant for failure combine in this fairytale set in the abandoned decay which was onced a glamorous Atlantic City. A sentimental education at the seashore off-season.

A short and inconclusive treatise on women and gambling. The allure of risk taking, the contradictions of excessive behavior and a penchant for failure combine in this fairytale set in the abandoned decay which was onced a glamorous Atlantic City. A sentimental education at the seashore off-season.

73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.

Writes Ahwesh: "Working through my archive of accumulated video footage, I pretended it was found footage from anonymous sources. What began as a tribute to Bruce Conner of the period of Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, with their deliberate pace and bittersweet memory of home, ended as a dedication to my father as I wound my way through miscellany with distance and another aim."

Martina plays on her own and with her mother, Jennifer talks, stock footage of flowers is talked over.

"The sociopolitical landscape of the West Bank is featured, drifting through a bewildering network of dead ends, voided zones and semi-porous borders. The term used in negotiation, 'kissing point' descries the point where two (enemy) territories must make a contract for the land to be shared, in the struggle over ownership and control." - Peggy Ahwesh

"A four-channel video with four flat screens in a square formation, in which eight prototypes for Trump’s wall stand in line on the San Diego border as shot by Ahwesh from the Mexican side. Unexpectedly, a man climbs over the current fence and disappears into the US, making the artist a “witness to a direct act of intention and desperation as well as to an act of optimism for the future”. Mirror and kaleidoscopic effects transform the linearity of the wall into circular, moving mandalas, heightening the sense of absurdity of such man-made separations." - Microscope Gallery