Ava Aviva Avnisan

Lives and works in San Diego, CA

Artist statement

“What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always, persecuted perhaps by the very chase we are leading? Here again what seems to be out in front, the future, comes back in advance from the past, from the back.” — Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx I make work in conversation with ghosts—erased histories, disavowed desires, repressed identities, places and people rendered absent by violence. Because the ghosts of injustices past and present are here, now—they’ve come back to demand justice. Working across installation, performance, film/video, writing, and music, I create embodied encounters with language that take seriously those demands for justice, enabling viewers to feel the presence—and grapple with the consequences—of that which has been rendered absent by history's so-called victors. I use emerging technologies such as 3D scanning, generative AI, and augmented reality, treating them not as neutral instruments but as historically situated materials developed within the orbit of the military, surveillance, and big tech. In my work, technology serves as an artistic medium through which the ghosts of past, present and future are conjured to support us in making space for that which is difficult to hold: grief, complicity, displacement, intimacy, the memory of a home that is no longer, or that is no longer ours. I'm drawn to fragments and palimpsests, to the way a partial image or broken text can carry a whole field of...

Artwork