Strange Weather

An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with appropriated videos of virtual reality demonstrations, among them a human hand shadowed by a computer-generated rendering, medical robots conducting a virtual surgery, and people dressed in bulky headgear navigating virtual spaces. As the title suggests, cyberspace adds to the Genesis legend a third possibility, a virtual existence that challenges natural and social definitions of gender and morality.

"A visual essay drawn from my experience of being embedded for some time in a place, one that is both beautiful and ancient but also is an abysmal war zone -- the occupied territory of Palestine. The piece quotes Jalal Toufic, Jean Genet and H.P. Lovecraft, drawing poetic lines between the familiar tropes of the revenant, the undead and the disembodied, with the lives of the Palestinians. Refugees, between worlds, yearning for their original soil, in limbo, lost in the labyrinth..." - Peggy Ahwesh

"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

An experimental documentary filmed over a two-year period, NOTES FROM THE LOWER EAST SIDE includes such personalities as Clayton Patterson, performance artist Penny Arcade, Anthology's own Jed Rapfogel, and other amazing HOWL Fest personalities.

73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.

Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting "the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor." — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader.

Part Two of Peggy Ahwesh's Pittsburgh Trilogy

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’ motion-sensitive lights to magical effect on the trees in my backyard.

Fragments from movies found in an abandoned cinema in Beirut. Retrieved by Mr. Salloum. Assembled by Ms. Ahwesh.

"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