Peggy Ahwesh

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.

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

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.

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.

"A video installation of four stacked monitors that focuses on two conflicting narratives of the military operation that successfully “took out” Osama Bin Laden: the official US version vs. that revealed through investigative reporting. Each story, reconstructed by the artist from 3D animation sequences culled from news sources online, plays on two monitors, with each pair at a 90-degree angle. The artist exposes the fine line between official history and myth making in one of the biggest news stories of the post 9-11 era, which triggered reactions and conspiracy theories worldwide. The work also contemplates the ways storytelling and video editing can serve as means to steer away from or approximate to the truth." - Microscope Gallery

"A four-channel video installation featuring original footage shot primarily from a bird’s eye view of the Kansas town known as the geographical center of the US as a way to reflect upon what the artist considers “a metonymy for the country as a whole”. Double-projection imagery of the aerial shots of this landscape — at times forming abstract and stereoscope-like compositions — become close-ups on grotesque monuments and sculptures as the camera descends to ground level. Additionally, two iPads both contained within glass domes each play a video of one of two houses that sit directly opposite each other in a residential Topeka neighborhood. One is the headquarters of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church with its anti-LGBTQ signs and other hate-filled rhetoric; the second is the “Equality House”, which was formed later as a direct response, with its rainbow colors and messages of peace and acceptance." - Microscope Gallery

"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

Refashioning the original intention of footage lifted from an online animated news outlet, The Falling Sky is a cautionary tale about the inexplicable sea and the tumultuous sky—a poetic tour through the dense landscape of recent news in a recap of human foibles, follies and crises that are increasingly out of alignment with the forces of nature.

"Refashioning the intent of footage lifted from an online Taiwanese news outlet, this cautionary tale is about the inexplicable sea - a poetic tour through the obsession to conquer the Great Whale to the current crisis of the migrants fleeing war." - Peggy Ahwesh

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 visual essay drawn from my experience of being embedded for some time in a place, one that is both beautiful and ancient but also is an abysmal war zone -- the occupied territory of Palestine. The piece quotes Jalal Toufic, Jean Genet and H.P. Lovecraft, drawing poetic lines between the familiar tropes of the revenant, the undead and the disembodied, with the lives of the Palestinians. Refugees, between worlds, yearning for their original soil, in limbo, lost in the labyrinth..." - Peggy Ahwesh

"Starting with YouTube videos made to convey world news through animation, I re-purposed them into short episodes of the Israeli-Gaza conflict of 2014. The 'cuteness effect' of the cartoon form allows for a buffer from reality, a viewing ease and distance that the video challenges." - Peggy Ahwesh

"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

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.

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.

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."

Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance. But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves. -- Jennifer Montgomery

An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with appropriated videos of virtual reality demonstrations, among them a human hand shadowed by a computer-generated rendering, medical robots conducting a virtual surgery, and people dressed in bulky headgear navigating virtual spaces. As the title suggests, cyberspace adds to the Genesis legend a third possibility, a virtual existence that challenges natural and social definitions of gender and morality.

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

Utilizing heat sensing imaging technology, scenes of everyday incidents of the city are transformed into glimpses of our world through an alien lens. Two insertions of on-screen text betray Ahwesh's ominous implications. The first is a meditation on Rudyard Kipling's oft-quoted "Truth is the first casualty of war," while the second takes the form of a hastily crafted e-mail, suggesting that its author has become withdrawn and pessimistic out of fear of some pending disaster. Originally made in response to the political climate of the Iraq War, Warm Objects remains a relevant portrait of the world in uncertain and paranoid times.

This lunar eclipse event of November 2003 is observed, documented, and translated by eye and hand via the light-sensitive medium of Kodachrome film. In the 4th c BCE Aristotle founded The Lyceum, a school for the study of all natural phenomena pursued without the aid of mathematics, which was considered too perfect for application on this imperfect terrestrial sphere. This film then, in the spirit of...

Peggy Ahwesh, H.D., 2005, still from video with sound, 1 min. 30 sec.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

A fragment from an unfinished project by Peggy Ahwesh.

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.

Activities at home with Mistress and her naughty pet.

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.

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.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

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.

A quartet of crack addicts, absorbed by their life of pure sensation, are holed up inside while the world outside is about to explode.

A quartet of crack addicts, absorbed by their life of pure sensation, are holed up inside while the world outside is about to explode.

A quartet of crack addicts, absorbed by their life of pure sensation, are holed up inside while the world outside is about to explode.

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.

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 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.

Buddy, a young gay man leaves his small-town home in rural Upstate New York to make a new life in New York City.

Buddy, a young gay man leaves his small-town home in rural Upstate New York to make a new life in New York City.

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

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.

Thanksgiving in California is the setting in which the viewer experiences "the depression inherent to festive occasions. There were many things bothering me at this time, or maybe it was one thing that broke into many pieces.

It's a portrait of my friend Renate, who was born in Berlin and spent her early childhood playing in the rubble after WW2. She tells stories and recites entries from her diary in both English and German, evoking history, trauma and lost loves. Shot in long verite-like takes, in Super 8 sound, with several color hand processed scenes.

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

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.

Part Two of Peggy Ahwesh's Pittsburgh Trilogy