ADA is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines the threshold between disappearance and reappearance, ruin and renewal. Born in Kazakhstan and now living in Paris, she works across installation, analog photography, performance, film, and crystallization, using architectural fragments and site-specific research to construct works that are at once factual and poetic. Her recent projects, developed through residencies in places such as Venice and Delhi, explore how buildings register time, violence, and survival, not only through form, but through the stories embedded in their material conditions. In this conversation, Yana Kotina speaks with ADA about origins, migration, cross-border identity, early performance and lens-based work, and the evolution of a practice that has come to treat architecture as both witness and interlocutor.

Yana Kotina: Do you remember the first image or gesture that made you feel, “I am an artist” - perhaps a photograph, an action, or even a found object?
ADA: It was a moment rather than an object. As a child, my parents worked in apple orchards high in the mountains. I loved sitting at the edge of a cliff above a river in early spring, waiting for the wind to lift the pale apple blossoms and make waves of pale petals beneath my feet. It was a private interval of quiet and beauty at a time when, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world around us felt dull and harsh. Finding those moments mattered. I think that was the beginning of my search for beauty.

YK: Your early work moved through photography, video, and performance. What did these forms allow you to explore at that time?
ADA: Even before art school, I imagined an ideal work that would bring together set design, staging, music, video, sound, and spatial elements. There was no single programme that taught exactly that, so I began with something that could extend my reach while remaining practical: the lens. The camera became a way of moving beyond a threshold.
Performance came as a natural next step. In The Second Skin, presented in Venice, I moved from the lens toward presence. The work questioned the fascination around the figure of the artist in the art world — the fluctuating waves of success, and the value and perception attached to the artist’s presence. It became one of several performative works I produced during that period.

Turning to the Built World

YK: From there, the work seems to open more decisively into space itself — into installation, construction, and eventually the built environment. How did that transition unfold?
ADA: My practice has always been in transition. Rather than a rupture, I see it as a continuation. From the beginning, each stage was part of learning what I needed to master in order to realise the work I had imagined. Installation was present from the early years, and over time it developed into increasingly large-scale structures.

One of the first key works in that direction was Pusto (Empty in Russian), a 52-metre-long labyrinth conceived for my solo exhibition at Tengri Umai Gallery in Almaty in 2008. What appeared at first as a large black podium concealed an interior space visitors were invited to enter one at a time, crawling in darkness. Inside, the work became an intensely solitary experience, bringing the viewer into contact with fear, disorientation, and their own inner thresholds through tactile and sonic passages. It culminated in a soundproof chamber lined with soft synthetic fur, where confusion gradually gave way to the sensation of a cocoon, before the return to the collective space of the exhibition.

Another important large-scale installation was Delirium (96 m³), originally commissioned for the reopening of Sanayeh Garden in the heart of Beirut. Taking the form of a reflective pavilion, it mirrored the surrounding lush garden and almost dissolved into the landscape. Its narrow entrance required the viewer to squeeze in deliberately. Inside, one stepped onto dunes of white marble sand, enclosed within a mirrored grotto, with a ruptured opening above framing the sky. Conceived as a meditative and sensorial environment, the work both reflected the visitor back to themselves and drew their gaze upward. It balanced a sense of wonder with a subtle undercurrent of violence. A later version was commissioned for Expo 2019 in Astana.

The making of such works demands deep reflection not only on the site where they are placed, but on the work itself as a new space. In that sense, these installations became a bridge between artwork and architecture, requiring not only structural plans, materials, and builders, but also time: time to understand a place, its history, its culture, and the people around it. Through this process, I became increasingly aware of how the built environment carries imprints of memory. In Beirut, where the scars of war remain visible in the city’s surfaces, that awareness became especially acute. It sharpened my desire to look beyond what is immediately apparent and to ask what buildings might tell us, if we truly listened.

YK: And what do fragments, more specifically, begin to reveal for you?
ADA: A passage from a book I’m currently reading comes to mind: “The task of the architect, the poet, the scientist is to listen, to learn how to make legible the inscrutable cultural and material writing of the sites we live and work within.” That is from Adam Dickinson’s text Amplified Stones in Making Matter What Too Often Does Not Matter.
Architectural fragments are, for me, strong allegories of human life. Buildings, like us, are made of many parts—foundation, structure, circulations, outer envelope. They hold memory, they evolve according to their surroundings and constraints, and they carry something like a soul. Paying attention to a specific fragment brings that larger construction—human and architectural—into view. In that sense, my process is almost anthropological: it places emphasis on listening to the structure, to the stories it can deliver, whereas most of the time we tend only to look at buildings.

First Crystallizations & Exhibitions

YK: Was crystallization the moment when that attention to fragments found its material language? In that sense, Ouvrage: Fantasmer le monde in Paris feels pivotal — the first time you brought crystallization into dialogue with architecture. What did that context make possible, both for the work and for the viewer?
ADA: Before that, I had already begun experimenting with crystallization through a series of discontinued banknotes. That first body of work revolved around the notion of value — what produces it, and what takes it away. By crystallizing banknotes that had gone out of circulation, I was giving them another life, another status.

Ouvrage: Fantasmer le monde was the first time I brought crystallization into relation with buildings and their memory. Showing the work inside a site under reconstruction was essential: it allowed visitors to encounter a moment in a building’s life that is rarely visible to the public.

By then, I had already begun developing a body of work around buildings in transitional states, in part through visits to restructuring sites in Paris with Emma Delages, with whom I share a fascination for the liminal life of the built environment. While I worked in the studio with fragments collected there, she was writing poetic impressions of the buildings we encountered.

The works shown in Ouvrage became the first public expression of this research. Organised by the Ouvrages collective, founded by Aymée Darblay, Noémie Sauve, and myself, the exhibition took place in a Haussmannian building in central Paris, offered by the development company Atland while it was undergoing major renovation. For me, it remains essential to share this sensitive state of a building with the public.

Method & Liminality

YK: Your work seems to unfold between chemistry and poetics, precision and unpredictability. Is that also where the idea of liminality enters?
ADA: Yes, very much so. There is a great deal of control and precision in the chemical preparation, but surprise is equally necessary. Even when the formula is exact, the way crystals grow on a particular surface can never be fully predicted. Each fragment reacts differently to the chemical bath according to its own material properties, producing singular formations of scale, density, and placement. In that sense, the material partly tells its own story through its transition into a new state.

That is also where liminality enters the work. I’m drawn to the in-between—to moments when something is no longer what it was, but has not yet fully become something else. Crystallization captures exactly that threshold: a brick no longer serving its original function, not yet debris, but on the verge of becoming a new body. Much of my practice is about making those transitional states visible, and drawing attention to moments we usually pass over.

YK: And what guides your choice of a fragment?
ADA: It works on two levels. First, methodologically: with architects, I study what a renovation will erase, conceal, or preserve, and I focus on what will soon disappear from view. Second, there is intuition—what catches my eye in situ.
For example, in a building in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, severely damaged by a fire at the beginning of the twentieth century, I found fragments that still bore visible traces of that event. I felt compelled to preserve and show them before they were dismantled or covered over. They were not only witnesses to the history of that building, but also markers of a larger history of Paris.

Residencies: Venice & India

YK: You recently completed two very different residencies, in Venice and in India. What was specific to each site, and how did each one shape the work differently?
ADA: They were very different indeed. In Venice, the residency lasted nearly three months and culminated in an exhibition presented as one of the collateral events of the 2025 Architecture Biennale. It was the longest time I had ever spent inside a single building. The site, Fabbrica 47A on Murano, a former glassblowing factory now becoming an art residency, was especially meaningful for the nature of my work.

Venice revealed the specificity of place in very material ways: salts rising through bricks and beams because of acqua alta, as well as constant shifts in humidity and temperature. What first appears as a technical difficulty becomes a story. It sharpened my attention to how materials that may look similar elsewhere behave very differently in a precise environment.

That same residency also brought me back to photography. I needed another tool. Installation and crystallization alone no longer felt sufficient for what I wanted to express. The camera became both documentation and magnification: I made large-scale portraits of unaltered decorative and structural elements that were likely to disappear, so they could be seen and held at the scale of their importance.

What continues to fascinate me is how a single fragment can open onto a much larger history. At Fabbrica 47A, I found bricks bearing inscriptions, and with the help of Sara Di Resta at IUAV in Venice, we were able to trace them back to the same brick factory that supplied much of the material for the island of San Michele. Through one small unit, an entire urban and historical network begins to unfold.

In India, through a residency organised by the Institut Français in collaboration with Khoj in Delhi, my attention focused on a ruin directly opposite the residency. There, I had less time for close material analysis, but I gained a stronger socio-political understanding of the site. The building’s condition was not only the result of natural decay; it had also been partially destroyed by authorities following legal disputes. That suspended state, an imposed liminality, revealed how administrative and political forces shape the physical life of structures. It was another reminder that buildings tell stories that go far beyond their material form.

Influences

YK: In relation to this way of reading buildings and materials, which artists feel especially close to your own way of thinking?
ADA: Gordon Matta-Clark is a guiding figure for me, especially in the way he approached buildings, but also society more broadly, even through food. Arcangelo Sassolino resonates through the physical and mental tension he creates with brutal materials. I would also mention Massimo Bartolini, Marc Leschelier, Felix Schramm, and Walter De Maria.
More broadly, I’m drawn to artists whose installations can be entered on several levels—works that can be immediately felt, but also unfolded much more deeply. I admire practices that remain open both to a non-specialist and to a highly informed viewer. At the same time, I wouldn’t describe myself as especially academic. My influences are constantly evolving, shaped by discoveries that remain deeply inscribed in my sensibility.

ADA (b. 1987, Kazakhstan) is a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist. A graduate of Chelsea College of Arts in London, she works across installation, analog photography, performance, film, and mineral transformation. Her practice explores the afterlives of architecture, tracing how memory, material, and identity become lodged in built space. Through fragments gathered from buildings in transition, photographic images, and processes of crystallisation, she constructs works that move between disappearance and reappearance, ruin and renewal.

Born and raised in Kazakhstan and shaped by years in London and Paris, ADA brings a cross-border sensibility to questions of place and belonging. Rather than anchoring the work to a single cultural identity, she engages the universal ways in which structures hold memory, absorb violence, and outlive their original function. Her work has been exhibited across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, including at the Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts, Manifesta 11, the Venice Biennale, and Expo 2017 Astana.