Movies: Peggy Ahwesh

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 ...

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

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 vi...

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

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 contradicti...

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 t...

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....

"From a series of text videos based on the Spam emails that used to flood my in-box. Vintage, from 2006."...

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...

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 adoles...

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 th...

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

"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 di...

"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 whol...

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 deliber...

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

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 com...

Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth....

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 ...