AHWESH Peggy

see also Peggy AHWESH

Peggy Ahwesh
ARTIST BIO

Over the last twenty years, Peggy AHWESH has produced one of the most heterogeneous bodies of work in the field of experimental film and video. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, synch-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. The work is primarily an investigation cultural identity and the role of the subject, in various genres.
Ahwesh work with subversively amateur forms, and also a discourse that yielded traditionally female-gendered themes like home and family, relationships, and confessions, which she appropriated as scenarios. Her practice insists on political and social topicality, handled with theoretical and formal rigor, with a nod to popular culture forms. She draws the audience into the world and traditions of avant-garde film and video, where, as she has remarked, "there's nothing to prove and no money to make," only the pleasures of the text.

Ahwesh was the subject of a midcareer retrospective, Girls Beware! at the Whitney Museum (1997). Other retrospectives include: Filmmuseum, Brussels, Belgium; Carpenter Center at Harvard University; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and Cinematexas 6, Austin, Texas. She has screened work in the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1995, 2002); New York Film Festival (1998, 2007); Flaherty Film Seminar (2003) and The P