There are striking parallels and resonant affinities between the practices – and even the biographical trajectories – of Liliya Lifanova and Lucas Samaras (1936–2024), despite the formal differences and temporal distance that separate them. The polyhedral nature of both artists’ work – a quiet, singular protest and an assertion of the self as misfit and outsider – resists classificatory logic and prevailing artistic narratives. At the core of each practice lies an exploration of selfhood, pursued through carefully constructed spatial environments shaped by light, handcrafted objects, and attire, conditions essential to their work though rarely foregrounded.

Lifanova’s THE ESTRANGEMENT SET occupies the entire gallery via a tilted platform populated with disparate sculptural elements, reshaping the space to constellate conditions of estrangement – an environment deliberately dissonant, a suspension of the ordinary, designed to dislocate the viewer from habitual perception. The installation recalls Samaras’s Room #1 (1964), which reconstructed his New Jersey studio as both setting and material for his work. Like Samaras, Lifanova presents an inventory of objects from her TO FOLD series; however, where Room #1 insists on presence and psychic immediacy, THE ESTRANGEMENT SET emphasizes distance, threshold, and mediation. Its objects are pared down, polished, and austere, reflecting a contemporary condition in which interiority is formalized and displaced. Together, these approaches frame the archive not as a static repository, but as a charged and unstable site in which the self remains perpetually in formation. Nested within this environment are Samaras’s Photo-Transformations (1973–76), Polaroid self-portraits altered with chemical reagents to produce psychedelic, uncanny images.

Extending the interplay between the psychomaterial space of creation and the public realm, Addenda II from Samaras’s story Dickman (1961–62) is positioned to be read at the exhibition entrance. The text sets the psychic tone of the installation: a visceral allegory of artistic inheritance in which history must be absorbed, digested, and endured, the act of swallowing both necessity and burden.