Peggy Buth

“In my work I consider forms of social representation and the processes of social acceptance or of marginalisation to which different individuals or groups are linked. (…) I pick up certain forms of symbolic politics and transform them in a way that their implicit violence or their underlying desire is turned visible.” Peggy Buth, 2020

*Vom Nutzen der Angst – The Politics of Selection*, 2019, Camera Austria, Graz / Foto: Markus Krottendorfer

About the artist

Peggy Buth limits herself neither to a specific medium, nor to a narrow understanding of art. Rather, she examines the representational systems of art, literature, politics, history and the sciences in relation to what gets repressed, as well as what unintentionally comes to light in them. She works with photography and video; uses tar, shellac or carpets for her pictures; works with found materials, language and sound; produces objects, sculptures and installations.

Peggy Buth’s artistic approach is conceptual and process-related. Her modular work groups are often preceded by in-depth, long-term research and research phases. Buth then subjects the collected material to an intensive, inter-disciplinary and intermedia editing process – photography, video, film, sound collage, performance, assemblage, graphics stand side by side on an equal footing and are brought together within complex room installations or smaller, more closely related ensembles.

Peggy Buth’s work follows the tradition of critical documentary art, as practiced by Hans Haacke and Harun Farocki. One of her core interests lies in the causes of different forms of exclusion; she raises questions about the meaning of solidarity and empathy, about the history and memory of emancipatory movements and their defeat in the wake of (de)industrialisation and globalisation. Yet Buth does not deliver critical visual essays with a message – her works are reports of a stopover, a path of orbit, through which the artist herself engages, surveying her own role in the process and bringing her own capacity for agency into play.

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“(…) Under these—post-documentary—conditions, how might the meaning of solidarity and empathy, the meaning of the history and the memory of emancipatory movements and self-empowerment, be perpetuated, and how might their diffusion in the course of (de)industrialization and globalization be countered? How can the idea of a utopia be recaptured?” Reinhard Braun, Camera Austria, 2019

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Publications

Vom Nutzen der Angst / The Politics of Selection, 2014-2019

Catalogue of "Vom Nutzen der Angst / The Politics of Selection, 2014-2019", En/De, numerous color and black-white illustrations, thread-sewn softcover with dust jacket and an inserted newspaper, 316 pp, Design and concept by Peggy Buth & Markus Dreßen, Spector Books, Leipzig, Germany, 2022

Publisher
Katalog – Desire in Representation

Catalogue of Peggy Buth's body of work "Desire in Representation", En/De, numerous colour photographs, thread-sewn paperback, 240 pp., Design by Peggy Buth & Till Gathmann, Spector Books, Leipzig, Germany, 2010

Publisher
Desire in Representation Part 1 (Travelling through the Musee Royale - Index (Register)) & Part 2 (O My Kalulu!)

Artist book in two volumes, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, 2008
Recall

Concept by Peggy Buth, Texts by Susanne Holschbach, Ed. Soro, Leipzig, 2003