Since the 1970s, US media artist Peggy Ahwesh (1954) has worked with a wide range of technologies, exploring their materiality and aesthetics in relation to her themes. She studied at Antioch College under avant-garde film legend Tony Conrad and began by making Super-8 home movies within Pittsburgh’s punk scene. Later, after moving to New York, she shot on 16mm film, video, and even PixelVision before also incorporating found footage into her work.

After college, Ahwesh organized film screenings and invited George A. Romero as her first guest; he immediately hired her as a production assistant for his film “Creepshow” (1982). She loved genre cinema—and horror films in particular—for their fantastic, extreme visual and aural effects.

The influence of this passion manifested in several of her films, though she did not adopt the genre’s narrative conventions. Instead, she developed a cinematic language that deliberately resists clear categorization. In the realm of fine art, she might be associated with “Arte Povera”, given that her means are always simple and often improvised. She frequently casts her female friends as protagonists and chooses camera angles that make no attempt to convey an aesthetically pleasing image of reality.

Ahwesh characterizes her feminist-inflected work as representing a female perspective; her performers portray the everyday lives of women—free from taboos and defying cultural codes—while drawing on their own experiences: “I twist theory to suit my purposes and make subjective the rules of filmmaking and representation – various techniques that are a critique of the dominating (patriarchal) mode in support of women in their reign, pleasure and control of the film screen.”

In the 2000s, the computer became Ahwesh’s primary tool. For instance, she created the famous “She Puppet” (2001) using material captured directly from her computer while playing the video game “Tomb Raider”, featuring the superheroine Lara Croft. On YouTube, she discovered computer-generated imagery (CGI) from a Taiwanese animation studio that reenacted real-world events for a news channel. These emotionless, simplified scenes offered her the opportunity to recycle them within a subjective, critical exploration of geopolitical and ecological themes. With these works, Ahwesh further expanded her investigations into media, entering the realm of fine art through exhibitions in various formats.

When she began to miss the act of capturing images and moods with a camera, she combined this pursuit with numerous trips—to the Middle East and across the United States, but above all to the areas inhabited by displaced Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank—in order to reflect on living conditions in an essayistic style.

Peggy Ahwesh has taught film and electronic art at Bard College since 1990; she is considered one of the most influential experimental filmmakers in the US, and her work is screened and exhibited worldwide. At last, this media artist’s magnificent and diverse body of work is being shown in Vienna.

In the presence of Peggy Ahwesh