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Lidia Russkova-Hasaya
b. 1993, Georgian-Russian
Lidia Russkova-Hasaya is a Georgian-Russian interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, immersive installation, sculpture, and glass. Educated at PACE University in New York, she describes the core of her practice as emotional architecture—the externalization of mental states through spatial, material, and sensory language. Rather than treating emotion as subject matter alone, she builds environments that register feeling as atmosphere and structure. Her installations frequently take the form of post-geographic spaces—portals, chamber experiences, live performance environments, and ethereal glass sculptures inspired by clouds. Glass, metal, neon, and plastic recur as primary materials, brought from industrial contexts into settings where their transparency, reflectivity, and malleability are emphasized.
The sky appears as a steady motif, introduced as an image, a tonal field, or a vector of light, and is associated with contemplation, healing, and renewal. Within these parameters, Russkova-Hasaya constructs architectures designed to be entered and sensed, rather than read as linear narratives. The artist’s background in theatre informs this approach. From 2019 to 2024, she directed the performance project SHE IS US at Teatr.doc in Moscow, a sustained initiative that placed presence, embodiment, and collective reflection at the center of artistic experience. That orientation carries into her installations, where timing, spacing, and the calibration of attention are handled as compositional tools. Visitors move through thresholds, encounter light and sound as structuring elements, and participate—often quietly—in a choreography of perception and interaction.
Russkova-Hasaya frames these spaces as instruments for reimagining feminine vulnerability as strength and for presenting transformation as an embodied experience. The works do not fix identity; they stage conditions in which identity can be reconsidered. Portals and chambers open onto transitional states rather than destinations, and the performances situate the body as a measure of shifting thresholds—between interior and exterior, self and other, ground and sky. The glass sculptures, frequently inspired by clouds, extend this logic into object form: they register fragility and resilience simultaneously, and they hold light in ways that alter the surrounding space without enclosing it. Personal history sets further terms for the practice, underpinning her interest in interrogating imposed identities and in searching for new forms of belonging. The installations and performances operate as temporary sites where memory, uncertainty, and vulnerability are not obstacles but conditions for becoming. The spaces are therefore open by design, organized around passage and reorientation rather than assertion.
Homesick, presented at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo in Venice in 2024, illustrates these concerns in an exhibition context. While each installation responds to its site, the project aligns with the artist’s broader aim of making emotional states spatially legible. The title points to a widely shared condition of distance and attachment. Rather than illustrating that condition, the work constructs an environment in which it can be sensed through material juxtaposition, modulated light, and a measured pace that slows viewers and concentrates their attention. The effect is consistent with Russkova-Hasaya’s stated priorities. Throughout the practice, the narrative is intentionally limited. The works resist fixed plots and embrace transitional states and open temporalities. Entrances and exits are not marked by definitive beginnings or ends; time is treated as durational and cyclical. This year, Russkova-Hasaya presented ROOMS: The Architecture of Memory in the group exhibition AROUND ABOUT, curated by Julia Harrauer at the Ioannou Alexiou Mansion in Piraeus, Greece, as part of OpenArtLink 2025. Performed at sunset within the port’s industrial setting, the work engaged the shifting conditions of metal, concrete, and sea. Through measured movement and calibrated spatial modulation, ROOMS translates internal states into legible spatial and temporal structures without resorting to narrative resolution.
Russkova-Hasaya’s installations and performances are calibrated for collective reflection without prescribing response. Proportions are set for shared occupancy; paths allow for passing and pausing; vantage points are arranged to enable solitude within proximity. In performance contexts, the stage logic from her theatre work is clear: bodies, light, and sound are tuned to the room so that presence is produced rather than represented. In installation contexts, the structures remain performative in the sense that the visitor’s movement completes them. The artist situates these efforts under the larger rubric of emotional architecture to emphasize method as much as concept. Materials—glass that can fracture or clarify, metal that frames and reflects, neon that writes with light, plastics that accept imprint—are chosen for how they condition perception. Taken together, the installations, performances, and sculptures mark a sustained inquiry into how internal states may be made spatial, how transformation may be given room, and how belonging might be rehearsed under open skies.
Born in 1993 in Kineshma, Russia, Lidia Russkova-Hasaya has exhibited at national and international institutional venues. Notable solo exhibitions include those at CREA Cantieri del Contemporanea in Venice, Italy, and the Ria Keburia Foundation in Tbilisi, Georgia. Recent group exhibitions encompass venues such as the Foundry in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates; the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art in Tbilisi, Georgia; Serene Gallery in Moscow, Russia, among others. The Georgian-Russian participated in the Ria Keburia Residency in Cannes, France, and the Ria Keburia Residency in Tbilisi, Georgia.
For more information, please consult the artist’s website here.
Last Updated on November 11, 2025
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About the author:
Maxim Foucquet is a curator, art critic, and contemporary artist residing and working in Belgium.
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