March 10, 2022
Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago
At this event, Peggy Ahwesh will present and discuss her 2020 pieces Kansas Atlas, Border Control, and Night Skies, alongside other recent video and installation work. DoVA Associate Professor Catherine Sullivan will then join Peggy to further discuss the presentation and Peggy's practice in general.
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.
Presented in partnership with the Film Studies Center