Peggy Ahwesh

Ahwesh
Kansas Atlas, 16min, 2020.

Thursday, March 10, 7pm
Logan Center for the Arts, Screening Room 201

Since the early 1980s, Peggy Ahwesh has forged a distinctive moving image practice in the ruins of originality and authority. Whether by working with nonprofessional performers, especially children, or by repurposing existing images—such as a decaying pornographic film, the video game Tomb Raider, or computer-animated news coverage—Ahwesh embraces improvisatory strategies that probe the critical potential of play. With keen attentiveness to the materiality of bodies and media technologies alike, her works articulate a feminist commitment to the marginal and the minor. Even as Ahwesh rejects the notion of style as authorial signature, her concerns with sexuality, subjectivity, and troubling the boundary between the animate and inanimate have remained constant across the decades.

At this event, Ahwesh will present and discuss her 2020 pieces Kansas Atlas, Border Control, and Night Skies, alongside other recent video and installation work. Q&A moderated by DoVA Associate Professor Catherine Sullivan. 

Masks and proof of vaccination are required for entry for this in-person event at the Logan Center. Learn more at arts.uchicago.edu/visitlogancenter.

Presented by the Film Studies Center and the Open Practice Committee