
Sevgi Macide Canik is an Istanbul-born, Paris-based conceptual artist of theatre, with a practice centred on scenography and a professional background in theatre and opera. Trained in architecture, she has pursued artistic research at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and developed her practice through professional experience in theatre and opera including the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe, the Opéra national de Paris, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, and Angers Nantes Opéra.
Her artistic research explores the relationships between body, space, and memory, with a particular interest in the political potential of scenographic elements. Rather than approaching scenography as the composition of objects, she understands it as the organisation of their behaviours, circulation, and relations. Drawing on the apparent political neutrality of objects, she investigates how they can infiltrate the mechanisms of staging and unsettle the established hierarchies of theatrical representation. Her practice questions how theatre can be destabilised from within, through the very elements, tools, and conventions that constitute it. In this sense, she approaches the stage as a political dispositif, where relations of power, visibility, and control are continuously organised and negotiated.
In her research at ENSAPB (École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris-Belleville), she approaches ritual not as a theme but as a methodological lens through which to examine the different temporalities at work on stage. Through the notion of passage, she considers the stage as a porous threshold of transfer, a site where processes initiated outside condense and are subsequently redistributed outward. Her aim is therefore less to invent new objects than to render different temporal regimes perceptible through fragile or seemingly non-political materials, reconsidering the political and critical potential of scenographic dispositifs.

Soft Monuments, site research, Athens, 2025