Peggy Ahwesh at Frieze London 2022

Peggy Ahwesh
Frieze London 2022
Focus Section, Booth H04
October 12-16, 2022
Online at Frieze Viewing Room from October 5th

Microscope is very pleased to present a solo booth (Focus Section, Booth H04) of new and recent works by the American media artist Peggy Ahwesh at Frieze London from October 12th through October 16th, as well as online in the Frieze Viewing Room, which goes live on October 5th. The new pigment prints, video sculpture, and 360-degree touchscreen videos on view address issues of displacement, cultural identity, world events as portrayed by news media and the role played by our hyper-connected society, among others.

In a new series of 10 digital collages “Poses,” Ahwesh uses human figures and objects culled from 3D animated international news streams, frozen in time and set against black backgrounds, to highlight the language of bodies experiencing a range of emotions from pleasure to extreme pain. The positions or “poses” of the often monochromatic and stylized characters — even when stripped of spacial, temporal, and most identifying features — still retain and convey the raw emotions of the corresponding real-life persons portrayed in the media and recorded by the camera lenses.

The underlying news imagery is by Taiwanese and other online news agencies reporting solely through 3D- animated stories based on actual footage by more traditional news outlets, as well as on reported facts for which cameras were not present at the moment of the incident.

“Poses is about a particular moment of bodies — captured in crisis, in fear, in action, in contemplation and/or in joy — and about how the body holds information in that moment and that pose and expresses emotion and feeling that is revealed and contained visually. These tropes of body posture become meaningful and symbolic when set together in an arrangement of tension and togetherness. We recognize and are ‘connected’ by the media and mediating technologies that show us heightened moments in the life of others...” — Peggy Ahwesh

“Re: The Operation,” a video sculpture of four stacked monitors, focuses on two conflicting narratives of the military operation that successfully “took out” Osama bin Laden: the official US version and that revealed through investigative reporting.

Both storylines are reconstructed scene-by-scene by the artist from 3D-animation sequences culled from Taiwanese and other online news sources. Both appear on two of the four alternating monitors, with each pair positioned at a 90-degree angle from the other. As the stories and timelines intersect and diverge, the work exposes the fine line between official history and myth making of one of the most significant news stories of the post-9/11 era, which triggered reactions and conspiracy theories worldwide. The work also contemplates the ways storytelling and video editing can serve as means to steer away from or approximate the truth.

“Ahwesh contends with notions of “post-truth” and “fake news” by putting competing narratives on display, using an animated form that only reinforces a sense of waning reality in a world of increasingly widespread disinformation.” — Tendai Mutambu, 2021

Other works include “Territory,” shot by the artist on a hand-held 360-degree camera in the landlocked territories of the West Bank. The work is a moving-image collage of moments from daily life — a mosque, an ancient olive tree, a shopping center, a soccer game, the main square in Ramallah, and the wall. The work juxtaposes scenes from different areas of the territory side-by-side, as in a split screen reconfigured for a spherical world, one in which demarcation lines lose meaning and filmmaking has to be reinvented.

Ahwesh’s approach to 360-degree videos — which are displayed on touchscreens that viewers may navigate with a finger by rotating the view-angle — is at once personal, political, and poetic. Often combining home movies, impromptu performances, scripted scenes, literary texts, and music, Ahwesh in this series of works reveals the uncanny within the ordinary and presents video as freed from the tyranny of the perspective, and as a haptic and interactive medium.

For inquiries or additional information please contact the gallery at [email protected]

Peggy Ahwesh (b. 1954 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a media artist who began in the 1970’s with feminism, punk and Super 8mm filmmaking. She is recognized for her use of a palette of technologies and practices to create the textures and aesthetics required for the subject matter of her moving image, installation, photography and other works. Retrospective exhibitions include: “Peggy Ahwesh: Visions Machines,” at Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway and at Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Girls Beware!, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Filmmuseum, Brussels, Belgium; Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; "Peggy’s Playhouse," Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Other exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; The Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (1991, 1995, 2002); The Kitchen, New York, NY; “Midnight Moment,” Times Square Alliance New York, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; JOAN, Los Angeles, CA; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, Germany; and Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Spain, among others. Her films and videos have screened extensively in the US and abroad including at Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; New Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, UK; Pompidou Center, Paris, France; and in festivals including New York Film Festival (1998, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2015); Rotterdam Film Festival (1999, 2002, 2004, 2005 2008); and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2017), among many others.

Ahwesh has received grants and awards including from the Alpert Award in the Arts, Creative Capital, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA). She is Emeritus Professor in Film and Electronic Art at Bard College, New York. Peggy Ahwesh currently lives and works between New York and the Catskills.