In Person:
Peggy Ahwesh
September 16 and 17, 2026
Since the 1970s, American media artist Peggy Ahwesh (born 1954) has worked with a wide range of technologies, using their materiality and aesthetics to explore her own themes. She took courses at Antioch College taught by avant-garde film legend Tony Conrad and began making Super 8 home movies in Pittsburgh's punk scene. Later, after moving to New York, she filmed on 16mm, video, and even PixelVision, before working with found footage as well.
After college, Ahwesh organized film screenings, inviting as her first guest George A. Romero, who immediately hired her as a production assistant on his film Creepshow (1982). She loved genre movies, especially horror films, for their fantastic and extreme visual and sound effects.
The influence of this passion manifested itself in her own films, even as she did not adapt the genre's storytelling traditions. To a far greater degree, she developed a filmic language which consciously avoided clear categorizations. Within the world of fine arts, her work could be classified as Arte Povera, since her methods are always simple and often improvised. Again and again, she brings together her friends as protagonists and chooses camera angles which never aim to convey an aesthetically pleasing image of reality.
Peggy Ahwesh characterizes her feminist-inspired work as embodying a female perspective, in which her female performers can show women's everyday lives without taboos and in defiance of cultural codes, and draw 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 most important tool. She assembled her well-known She Puppet (2001) from footage recorded straight off her computer while she played the video game Tomb Raider with the superhero Lara Croft. On YouTube, she discovered the computer-generated images (CGI) of a Taiwanese animation studio, which reconstructed real events for a news channel. The emotionless, simplified scenes allowed her to repurpose them through a subjective and critical engagement with geopolitical and ecological topics. With these works, Ahwesh further expanded her media research and entered the domain of fine arts with exhibitions in a variety of formats.
Missing the practice of collecting images and moods with her camera, she combined this pursuit with numerous trips to the Middle East and throughout the United States, but above all in areas inhabited by the marginalized Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank, to reflect, in an essayistic form, on living conditions.
Since 1990, Peggy Ahwesh has taught film and electronic arts at Bard College. She is one of the most-influential experimental filmmakers in the United States and her work has been exhibited and shown around the world. At long last, the media artist's wonderful and multifaceted works can be seen Vienna as well. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer / Transation: Ted Fendt)
With Peggy Ahwesh in attendance
Since the 1970s, American media artist Peggy Ahwesh (born 1954) has worked with a wide range of technologies, using their materiality and aesthetics to explore her own themes. She took courses at Antioch College taught by avant-garde film legend Tony Conrad and began making Super 8 home movies in Pittsburgh's punk scene. Later, after moving to New York, she filmed on 16mm, video, and even PixelVision, before working with found footage as well.
After college, Ahwesh organized film screenings, inviting as her first guest George A. Romero, who immediately hired her as a production assistant on his film Creepshow (1982). She loved genre movies, especially horror films, for their fantastic and extreme visual and sound effects.
The influence of this passion manifested itself in her own films, even as she did not adapt the genre's storytelling traditions. To a far greater degree, she developed a filmic language which consciously avoided clear categorizations. Within the world of fine arts, her work could be classified as Arte Povera, since her methods are always simple and often improvised. Again and again, she brings together her friends as protagonists and chooses camera angles which never aim to convey an aesthetically pleasing image of reality.
Peggy Ahwesh characterizes her feminist-inspired work as embodying a female perspective, in which her female performers can show women's everyday lives without taboos and in defiance of cultural codes, and draw 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 most important tool. She assembled her well-known She Puppet (2001) from footage recorded straight off her computer while she played the video game Tomb Raider with the superhero Lara Croft. On YouTube, she discovered the computer-generated images (CGI) of a Taiwanese animation studio, which reconstructed real events for a news channel. The emotionless, simplified scenes allowed her to repurpose them through a subjective and critical engagement with geopolitical and ecological topics. With these works, Ahwesh further expanded her media research and entered the domain of fine arts with exhibitions in a variety of formats.
Missing the practice of collecting images and moods with her camera, she combined this pursuit with numerous trips to the Middle East and throughout the United States, but above all in areas inhabited by the marginalized Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank, to reflect, in an essayistic form, on living conditions.
Since 1990, Peggy Ahwesh has taught film and electronic arts at Bard College. She is one of the most-influential experimental filmmakers in the United States and her work has been exhibited and shown around the world. At long last, the media artist's wonderful and multifaceted works can be seen Vienna as well. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer / Transation: Ted Fendt)
With Peggy Ahwesh in attendance