Exhibition: Vision Machines

Exhibition on Peggy Ahwesh at Kunsthall Stavanger (Norway). Curators: Erika Balsom and Robert Leckie

Vision Machines is the first survey exhibition in Scandinavia by the groundbreaking American artist and experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh. Focusing on a selection of works made between 1993 and 2021 that explore the relationship between technology and the body, the exhibition 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.

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