Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines

Vision Machines is the first survey exhibition in Scandinavia by the groundbreaking American artist and experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, on view at Kunsthall Stavanger this Spring, 9 February–20 May, 2022. The exhibition focuses on a selection of works made between 1993 and 2021 that explore the relationship between technology and the body, and spans notions as diverse as gender, climate change, war, and the increasing virtualisation of everyday life.

Having engaged with the changing media landscape throughout her career, Ahwesh appropriates images and conventions associated with media forms that others might consider disposable or unserious. For Ahwesh, experimenting with these media often leads to a playful unravelling of the politics of representation across so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of culture.

Ahwesh is a widely celebrated experimental filmmaker who has had a profound influence on younger generations of artists and filmmakers. Her early works often feature non-professional performers, many of them women and girls, who offer up improvised presentations of the self. In her later works, the driving force becomes the formal exploration of new technologies and their relationship to artificiality and crisis. Across her practice, Ahwesh brings into focus the materiality of bodies and shifting media technologies, articulating a feminist commitment to the marginal and the minor.

In 2014, Ahwesh began a series of works using images appropriated from a single archive: animations of contemporary news events produced for online circulation by the Taipei-based Next Animation Studio. By adopting multiple forms of presentation for this cycle of works — including CRT monitor stacks in Re: The Operation and Lessons of War and large-scale projections in Verily! The Blackest Sea, The Falling Sky, or as in this case, a tiny iPhone screen — Ahwesh gestures to the capacity of her source images to circulate widely across diverse platforms. In Smart Phone, the device in question is associated with commerce, surveillance, and self-destruction. To make She Puppet, Ahwesh edited screen recordings of her own play of the video game Tomb Raider III,pairing them with borrowed music and a voiceover in which three women read excerpts from the modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, the jazz musician and Afro-futurist Sun Ra, and feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ. Ahwesh has called the game’s protagonist Lara Croft a ‘virtual girl-doll of the late twentieth century’, discerning in her ‘an unstable yet powerful triad of outsiders: thealien, the orphan, and the clone’. Here, Ahwesh’s interest in female performers and her love for the assisted readymade come together, as she examines the aesthetics of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and investigates the capacity of media technology to simulate life and defy death.

On the heels of Kunsthall Stavanger’s multimedia and moving image exhibitions LEAN and Swinguerra (both in 2021), Vision Machines is exemplary of the institution’s heightened focus on screen-based works and digital native exhibitions. The 2022 program will continue to explore new formats at the forefront of exhibition-making in the digital age, culminating in the forthcoming debut of the Kunsthall's online-only exhibition platform and new website later this year. Vision Machines is co-curated by Erika Balsom and Robert Leckie, and was first on view at Spike Island in Bristol, UK.