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Bethlehem

A personal miscellany that began as a tribute to Bruce Conner’s experiments with found footage such as Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland.

Director

Country

Year

2009

Duration

8 mins

The Swing

A performance to camera of Tina Keane swinging. An image of ‘she’ from girlhood to womanhood. Based on a performance at the Serpentine Gallery in the same year, the motion of the swing sets a tempo for a repeating image that gradually transforms over time. Utilising the self-reflexive quality of new video technology, the work reflects a feminist idea of radical change in which the image of ‘she’ or ‘her’ needs also to be radically altered.

Director

Country

Year

1978

Primary Contact

guest

Duration

6 mins

Distributor

guest

The Vision Machine

Here Ahwesh’s heterogeneous textual approach comes to the fore, as she juxtaposes narrative, faux documentary, comedic and ‘serious’ footage, and merges film, video, and Pixelvision. Suggestions and meanings accumulate: austere, theoretical text is interrupted by shots of women relating bawdy (sexist) jokes; classic R&B music plays while women stomp on records and pour alcohol on the floor. The Vision Machine is a fragmented enquiry into issues of gender, language and representation.

Director

Country

Year

1997

Duration

20 mins

She Puppet

Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality.

Director

Country

Year

2005

Duration

15 mins

The Scary Movie

Ahwesh’s two young actresses, Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A roughly corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and ‘scary’ music suggests that the girls’ toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

Director

Country

Year

1993

Duration

9 mins