About the exhibition

Blending historical investigation, speculative transfuturism, and autofiction, Ava Aviva Avnisan’s immersive, multidisciplinary installation Specters of Home invites viewers into a narrative universe that grapples with the complex ways in which personal, familial, and geopolitical stories become entangled.

The exhibition — her first solo museum presentation — is anchored by two experimental short films presented within a haunting immersive visual environment. A large-scale composite landscape wallpapered onto the gallery walls, created through renderings of high-resolution lidar data scans, produces a liminal space suspended between past and future; fact and fiction; home and diaspora; and, through the voice-over narrations of the films, English and Spanish.

Based on Avnisan’s experience of being born in Jerusalem in the 1980s as a girl in a boy’s body to a European, Jewish-American father and an Arab, Jewish-Israeli mother, Specters of Home engages with questions of exile, displacement, and refugeehood; biological family and chosen family; and the ethical complexities of fleeing persecution in one’s home country to begin again in an adopted language and culture.

The films

Materials & methods

Combining a wide range of visual materials — footage from family archives and the Israel Film Archive, generative AI animations, and ghostly renderings of the ruins of a Palestinian village alongside the Southern California landscape created from 3D lidar data scans — the project explores our responsibility to history’s past, present, and future ghosts as they call on us to demand justice.

Themes

Exhibition details