The Balcony

  • 08/03/2024 • 11/05/2024

    Slow Drift(s) Chapter 1: Peggy Ahwesh

    With two screening events curated by Alcaeus Spyrou and wysiwyg.

    Peggy Ahwesh is an artist whose extremely rich video art practice encompasses a diversity of techniques and aesthetics: from (early) video games to found footage, thermal cameras, 3D visualization of news, and toy cameras. Her playful yet critical approach towards such devices of “vision” and representation of the world offers an unexpected angle on our hyper-accelerated reality. The selected works on view at The Balcony through the exhibition period will be She Puppet (2001), The Third Body (2007), Beirut Outtakes (2007), and The Falling Sky (2017). Through Ahwesh’s feminist perspective, the selected works touch upon topics such as identity and mortality in the technocratic landscape, gleeful disruptions of high and low, the bombardment of fragmentary information by mass media, and the consequent slow drain of our subjectivity. Reality fades towards abstraction, an abstraction strictly defined by the binary logic of 0s and 1s, a binarism whose legitimacy Ahwesh wishes to challenge. This Chapter opens the cycle Slow Drift(s) at The Balcony. Since the idea behind Slow Drift(s) is to connect different generations of video artists, the exhibition with Peggy Ahwesh will be enriched by two evenings curated in partnership with external collaborators, which for this edition will be filmmaker Alcaeus Spyrou, and the collective wysiwyg (what you see is what you get), both based in The Hague. The selection of wysiwyg includes an artist from The Hague, Vladimir Vidanovski (A CAUTIONARY TALE, 2022), Raquel Vermunt from Rotterdam (Face Home View, 2022) and international artists Leonhard Muellner (Operation Janewalk, 2016) and Maryam Tafakory (Nazarbazi, 2022). Evening curated by wysiwyg: 29.03.24. Alcaeus Spyrou has selected the following video works by international artists: Ork Haus (2022) from Theo Triantafyllidis, Hardly Working (2022) from the collective Total Refusal, and HFT The Gardener (2015) from Suzanne Treister. Evening curated by Alcaeus Spyrou: 03.05.24.

About The Balcony

The Balcony is an exhibition and curatorial platform based in The Hague, founded in 2018 by Arthur Cordier & Valentino Russo. The Balcony curates exhibitions supporting the presentation of upcoming practices with a focus on alternative formats of display, keen on collaborations and often unconventional locations. Starting 2023 The Balcony is initiated by Arthur Cordier (BE), Valentino Russo (IT), Abril Cisneros (ES/MX), Mari Kolcheva (BG) and Ariane Toussaint (FR/ES).


Nieuwe Molstraat 14-A2
2512 BK Den Haag

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