expanded
scenography

IRINA KOMISSAROVA

research

This research is grounded in expanded scenography: the spatial, temporal, and sensory organisation of spectatorship, rather than the design of illustrative space.

Here, scenography becomes a medium for complex and difficult-to-represent subjects, and a visual language for working with what cannot always be addressed directly. It operates across performance, installation, film, sound, light, and generative audiovisual systems.

The research focuses on how attention, rhythm, timing, thresholds, and the position of the spectator shape experience from within. The spectator becomes the primary site of the work.

Scenography is understood through what it does: how it organises perception, produces tension, and structures sensory experience. The work treats rupture, distortion, and discontinuity as materials that shape perception, memory, and bodily response. Fear is approached through negative space: what is withheld, displaced, or only partially visible, rather than directly shown.

In projects such as de:manifestation and Dark Patterns, this approach allows the work to stay close to what is often left unspoken, without turning it into direct illustration.

method

Research is carried out through observation, testing, contextual reading, and attention to the structural conditions that shape production and perception. It includes spatial composition, planning, resource distribution, production systems, material relations, and institutional frameworks.

Immersion develops through sustained engagement with place, atmosphere, rhythm, and the relations between body, object, and space. It also builds the conditions for collaboration by establishing a shared spatial and conceptual context in which collaborators can orient themselves actively within the work.

Action takes place through direct work with space. Objects, materials, light, and spatial interventions are used to construct perceptual conditions rather than illustrations. Space becomes an active agent in shaping attention, tension, and experience.

This approach was further grounded through MA studies at Norwegian Theatre Academy and continues to develop through independent artistic research.

selected works from
performance, theatre and hybrid projects

2026 | LT | wondrous realms | art residency co-curator
2025 | LT | cannibalisms | co-creator

Irina Komissarova (she/her) is a scenographer and transdisciplinary artist researcher based in Europe since 2011, primarily in Lithuania. She works within expanded scenography, treating it as spatial dramaturgy and composing atmosphere through rhythm, proximity, timing, sound, light, and minimal material interventions.

She is an MA graduate of the Norwegian Theatre Academy, where she developed an artistic research approach rooted in embodied perception. Her background also includes studies in Interior and Environmental Design at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow, a BA in Scenography from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and further training through programs at the Meyerhold Centre and the Moscow Art Theatre School.

In 2025, she completed a year long internship at Studio Tosatti in Naples and contributed to Paradiso, a large scale site specific project presented during Milan Art Week and Milan Design Week 2025. Her portfolio spans theatre scenography, installations, and public space interventions across European cities, alongside independent performative and audiovisual works.

Her current research unfolds through the universe of de:manifestation, a series of related projects and iterations where scenography becomes a medium for difficult-to-represent subjects and a visual language for what cannot always be addressed directly. Through sound, light, timing, thresholds, repetition, and controlled absence, she constructs situations where meaning appears, dissolves, or remains partially withheld. Her practice examines how perception is shaped by rupture, tension, memory, and bodily response.