Peggy Ahwesh

2 march, 2006 - 23 march, 2006
Place
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Curatorship
Perry Bard
Peggy Ahwesh. The Deadman,1989
Peggy Ahwesh. The Deadman,1989

The world of Ahwesh’s films is unquestionably female. However, the femininity that emanates from pieces like The Color of Love (1994), The Vision Machine (1997) and the more recent She Puppet (2001) is a far cry from the feminine ideal found in commercial and genre film, despite her intense dialogue with those models. Her kingdom lies in the suffocating claws of culture. While Ahwesh was able to create a strange sensation of distance with respect to pornographic film codes in The Color of Love by using Astor Piazzolla’s concertina in the background of a scene that is simultaneously voluptuous and pathetic, in She Puppet, it is the language of videogames that is transgressed through her subtle re-editing of the videogame Tomb Rider and its heroine Lara Croft. The irony of the image of the female body turned into an object of sexual exploitation in commercial genres appeared in her first film The Scary Movie (1993), in which two girls wearing painted moustaches and sideburns laugh and scream while fondling each other in an ignorant imitation of sex.

Returning to the words of Myles: “In Ahwesh’s films, you can never forget that woman is an animal. Something beautiful, savage, pathetic, left behind. Something that begs to be filmed. […] Peggy’s hero is the anonymous woman, a monster if you see her in a certain way, a deity, a captive dignitary if you interpret her in another. […] In all of her work there is something naughty. We women are a mystery to ourselves”.