Artist Statement
Ava Mirage Wanbli (b.1989) is a Chicago based new media performance artist. In ritualized actions, Ava addresses consumption and the production of the self through an interdisciplinary practice of performances, sculpture, new media , and real time rendering engines. Ava uses 3D scanning as a way to archive her own body in its process of becoming while utilizing live performance to engage with hyper sexualization, voyeurism, consumption of bodies and representations of personal and collective histories as a trans woman. Her work has been supported in a solo exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin and Depaul Art Museum in Chicago. She has attended ACRE Residency and has received the Make A Wave Artist Award from 3Arts organization in Chicago. She has recently been featured as one of the ten New City 2024 Breakout Artists of Year in Chicago.
I work across performance, experimental video games, sculpture, and new media to transcribe my body into physical and virtual space. Through these forms, I explore how trans identity moves within systems of hyper-visibility, labor, desire, and consumption—within both digital platforms and lived experience.
My work examines persona economies and the ways bodies, especially trans women’s bodies, are viewed, desired, monetized, and mythologized. By interweaving technology—particularly video game engines and interactive systems—I build environments where identity is not fixed but constructed, revised, and embodied in real time.
Performance is central to my develpment in my art practice. I approach it as generative ritual, a process of making and remaking the self in multitudes. I am interested in the cyclical nature of becoming, in how the body changes over time, and in how intimacy is shaped in the shadow of voyeurism and economic exchange.
I consider myself a world-builder. Through modular, sensory experiences, I create interactive mythologies that allow me to deconstruct and reconstruct myself—as a trans woman, as an artist, and as an evolving system of expression. My work invites viewers into active participation in this process of self-making and collective becoming.
Artist Statement PDF