Marinika Sadgyan

Marinika Sadgyan (born in 1990) is an installation artist and architect based in Paris. She studied interior design at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow and completed a Master's degree in Performance Design at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2012–2014). Her Master's thesis, ‘Fictionalising Spaces: Hotel as a Site for Performance,’ analyses the unique and enigmatic context of hotels through the prism of artistic projects. In parallel with this research, she has created fictional settings for various hotels in England and Russia, developing a method in which text—in forms ranging from archival documents to fiction she writes herself—serves as the conceptual basis for her installation practice. Through these works, she explores notions of strangers, hidden identities, subtle shifts between public and private space, as well as the invisible histories and layers of time and history inscribed in architecture.
Over the past decade, her work has shifted towards collaborative installation projects developed in response to specific built or natural environments, as well as large-scale interior architecture projects focused on eco-design and renovation in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, France, and Germany. In 2023, after three years of study and construction, she completed — with Archiproba Studios — the interior architecture of the headquarters of tyre manufacturer Schwalbe in Germany. Incorporating cutting-edge sustainable products and materials, this project is a rare large-scale realisation of a cradle-to-cradle approach in contemporary architecture.
In order to pursue the recurring question that runs through her work—how does the past become the present?—she began a doctoral project in 2025, joining the EUR'ORBEM laboratory at Sorbonne University and the OCS research unit at the Paris-Est School of Architecture. This research explores themes central to her practice, such as the preservation and transmission of memories of sites and landscapes undergoing metamorphosis. The project extends and formalises reflections from more than a decade of international practice at the intersection of art and architecture.