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