Monday November 24, 7pm
Artist Talk & Book Release: Peggy Ahwesh
In conversation with Linda Norden
In-Person and Live-Streamed
Livestream from Microscope
The artist talk starts at 7:15pm ET. If not visible, please reload the page.
Microscope is very pleased to present a conversation between Peggy Ahwesh and curator Linda Norden in connection with Ahwesh’s current solo exhibition at the gallery “Navigations,” which remains on view through December 13th.
The talk will address Ahwesh’s works in the show including her new 5-channel video installation “The Wayfinders,” constructed from video sequences of play-throughs in the game “Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight,” a two-channel video “Qalandia,” and photographic works on view.
The works are mainly located in the Eastern Mediterranean areas of the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria and also draw upon the artist’s experience as a second generation Syrian-American and her time in the early 2010s living and working in Ramallah.
The inspiration and starting point of the two video installations is an airport in the West Bank, which has been abandoned for 25 years as has been under the control of three governments — British, Jordanian, and Israeli since it began operations in the 1920s. In both, air flight, real and imagined, is used to consider themes such as power, control, border and notions of freedom.
The discussion will take place in-person at the gallery and will also be live-streamed on this page at 7pm on Monday November 22nd.
The evening also marks the release of Ahwesh’s new artist book “Sediment,” which includes personal stories and imagery related to her Syrian roots, among others. The book will be available at the gallery, along with copies of her “Sourcebooks” published by Visual Studies Workshop earlier this year.
Admission is free.
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Peggy Ahwesh is an artist working primarily with film, video, and installation whose practice is an inquiry into feminism, cultural identity and genre. Her work engages political and social topicality, handled with theoretical rigor, while at the same time using humor and mistakes in an open embrace of the inexplicable. Her works have screened and exhibited extensively in the US and internationally. Institutional exhibitions include at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Kitchen, NY, NY; Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; JOAN, Los Angeles, LA; and George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (on view through November 2), among others. Ahwesh has received numerous grants and awards including from the Guggenheim Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA)and the Alpert Award in the Arts. She is the recipient of the 2025 Stan Brakhage Vision Award. Her works are in the permanent art collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, among others. Peggy Ahwesh was born in 1954 in Canonsburg, PA and lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and the Catskills.
Linda Norden is a curator, lecturer and writer who has contributed to the discourse about many contemporary artists for Artforum, BOMB, The Art Journal, and for various catalogs and publications. She is on the board of the Los Angeles non-profit space JOAN and on the advisory board at Carriage Trade. Norden curated contemporary art at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum between 1998 and 2006; directed the City University of New York’s Graduate Center Gallery (The James Gallery) from 2008–10; and served as Commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion for the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she organized Ed Ruscha’s project, Course of Empire, with Whitney Museum curator and deputy director, Donna DeSalvo and produced Pierre Huyghe’s film and installation, “This is not a time for dreaming…,” with Scott Rothkopf, for the Harvard University Art Museums. At Joan, she curated “Heart_Land” with Ahwesh, an exhibition featuring four varied video installations based on films made between the early aughts and 2019: The Star Eaters; Lies & Excess; Bethlehem; and Kansas Atlas, with a “curtain accompaniment” by artist Yunhgee Min. As a professor of art history, theory, and criticism Norden has taught at Cornell, the Malmo Art Academy in Sweden, The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, among others. She is currently at work on an essay on artist Craig Kalpakjian, “Pets, Pests, and A Disquieting Muse,” for a forthcoming monograph, and is helping to edit a forthcoming memoir on the artist John Wesley with Bill Barrette, executor of Wesley’s estate. And she will be adding this exhibition to a series of squibs on “Best Exhibitions of 2025,” for a year-end zine orchestrated by independent curator Bob Nickas for his New York Art critics Association.