[6] Nakhova received international recognition as a young artist for Rooms (1983–1987), the first "total installation" in Russian art, located in the Moscow apartment where she still lives today.

In 2013, Nakhova was awarded the Kandinsky Prize in the category of Project of the Year, one of the highest honors in contemporary Russian art, for her work Untitled.

This is my attempt to understand the inexplicable state of affairs that has reigned in my country for the last century, and to understand through private imagery how millions of people were erased from history and happily forgotten; how people have been blinded and their souls destroyed so that they can live without memory and history.

"As with [Vadim] Zakharov's project, the architectural features of the pavilion comprise an important component of Nakhova's installation.

The result: the Russian Pavilion takes on the appearance of a romantic gazebo, while concealing within itself the spatial metaphor of Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915).

Another installation presented in this pavilion was her project 'rooms' which were a complex of five different spaces between art, architecture and the viewers point of view.

Major exhibitions include Post Pop: East Meets West (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2014);[11] Irina Nakhova and Pavel Pepperstein: Moscow Partisan Conceptualism (Orel Art UK, London, 2010); Moscow Installation (Künstlerhaus, Kalrsruhe, Germany, 2006); Berlin–Moscow / Moscow–Berlin, 1950–2000 (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2003–04); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Queens Museum, New York, 1999); Laughter Ten Years After (which travelled to six museums and galleries in the United States and Canada, 1995); After Perestroika: Kitchenmaids or Stateswomen (Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1993); The Work of Art in the Age of Perestroika (Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, 1990); and Iskunstvo: Moscow– Berlin (Bahnhof Westend, West Berlin, 1988).

Nakhova's work is in public and private collections throughout France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.