In 2015, the Graham Foundation, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, presented Barbara Kasten: Stages, the first major survey of the work of the Chicago-based artist. The exhibition spanned her nearly five-decade engagement with abstraction, light, and architectural form. Since the 1970s, Kasten (b. 1936) has developed her expansive photographic practice through the lens of sculpture, painting, theatre, textile, and installation. Well-known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, the artist has recently begun to be reconsidered within the broader context of architectural theory. This book, Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015-2020), concretizes this legacy within the artist's practice and contextualizes her ongoing investigations into how moving images and perception play within and through architectural forms.
Departing from Stages, the publication includes texts that encompass Kasten's work and exhibitions within the last five years while connecting to the artist's history of experimentations with light, including the influence of architect Le Corbusier, as well as site-specific responses to Shigeru Ban and Mies van der Rohe. Replete with full-colour plates, this book features a long-form interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose Chicago Marathon stage in 2019 was designed by Kasten; a two-part essay by artist Irena Haiduk on the construction of the camera and the artist's collaborations with corporate entities such as Polaroid; a feminist examination of the Bauhaus from architecture critic and curator Mimi Zeiger; relationships between Kasten's constructions and mid-century architects from Mexico and Brazil by Humberto Moro; and a speculative investigation into historical moments that provide a 'stage' through which to consider Kasten's formulations of space as cinema by editor Cristello.