Lithuanian-American artist Aleksandra Kasuba (1923 – 2019) was renowned for her innovative work combining architecture, environmental design and sculpture. Her trailblazing efforts laid the foundations for today’s immersive art. Kasuba pioneered new forms of spatial creativity, especially large-scale public interventions that harnessed unconventional materials, like nylon, integrated light, fabrics and organic shapes.
Having initially studied sculpture and design at the Kaunas School of Arts and Vilnius Art Academy, Kasuba was forced to flee Lithuania in 1944 at the age of 21, following the impact of Nazi and Soviet occupations. Along with her sculp- tor husband Vytautas Kašuba, she moved to a displaced-persons camp in Munich and lived there until 1947. After that, she emigrated to the USA, making New York her eventual base. The harrowing experiences of becoming a refugee and immigrant significantly impacted her practice. According to art critic and culture journalist Jogintė Bučinskaitė in AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions), “for the rest of her career she developed the idea of architecture as a harmonious shelter and explored how the physical environment could contribute to the well-being of its inhabitants.”
The Wanderer, a probable manifestation of Kasuba’s migrations, was an invented alter ego. It first appeared in the 1950 drawing The Little Man. The figure of a lonely nomad drifting through different places was a recurring theme in later works, such as the manifesto Utility for the Soul (1970) and the watercolour series A Life (2012-2013). The motif followed Kasuba throughout her carer, as her approach to art-making developed. The early years in America saw her experimenting with different materials, like tiles, brick, marble and granite. She used these to design walls, mosaics and murals for major public buildings – including the Rochester Institute of Technology, 560 Lexington Avenue, even 7 World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the 9/11 attack. Kasuba later settled into working with the potentials of tensile fabrics to create “environments” rather than conventional installations.
Environments are structures loosened of several constraints; they emerged in the late 1950s as part-functional, part-philosophical, part-aesthetic experiments made tangible, belonging to a newly forming genre of space-making. Whilst Kasuba’s practical public projects brought in money, they primarily served as sites for artistic experimentation. In 1965, she wrote: “My understanding of line, plane, structure, art all changed. I began to elaborate on the illusion, trying to capture it, to freeze it in matter. I want my work to be no longer space-filling, but space-making.” Kasuba’s environments were utopias – alternative, bright futures. Importantly, they were crafted without right angles, which one could inter- pret as the hard, angular edges of boundary and restriction.
Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes charts this impressive trajectory. The gallery holds the largest collection of the artist’s works from 1940 – 2018, and is presenting the first major retrospective in France and Europe. Imagining the Future positions Kasuba as “a visionary of the 20th century space exploration era … known for her multidisciplinary practice on the threshold of design, architecture and experimental art.” Curator, Elona Lubytė, particularly asserts the importance of the exhibition because it presents a story of optimism in turbulent times. Kasuba’s practice was a person- al valve of hope and resilience, and perhaps for those in the Cold War era as well, who were reckoning with the changing world order, trying to imagine a future amid impending nuclear doom. Lubytė states: “It is very important that in these dark times the exhibition is constructed as a bright, optimistic success story.” Thus, audiences, too, are invited to imagine a future beyond the various impending apocalypses facing us right now, from climate change and war to technocapitalism.
Six rooms and three spaces for videos are dedicated to mapping Kasuba’s creative journey, beginning with an introduction to The Wanderer figure, who guides visitors through key stages of her career. Each of these moments is displayed in the sections Spectrum, An Afterthought; Laboratory of Environments; Environments for the Soul; Art in Science; and Rock Hill House. “The Wanderer is the connecting axis of the exhibition,” says Lubytė. Additionally, an archive of documents donated by Kasuba to the Lithuanian National Museum of Art is on show, alongside contributions from some of the artist’s friends, namely “perfumer Danutė Pajaujis Anonis, actress and cinematographer Pola Chapelle, Fluxus artist George Maciunas and avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas.”
In Spectrum, An Afterthought, Kasuba’s titular 1975 environment, attendees experience the pinnacle of her structural ethos in rejection of right angles. They also examine Kasuba’s use of colour and light in the form of rainbow archways and investigate the complexity of the artist’s chosen materials; the environment is made with aluminium, coloured filters, neon lamps, plastic, plywood, steel and synthetic fabric.
Meanwhile, Laboratory of Environments focuses on Kasuba’s “involvement in the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) movement in the USA in the 1960s”, which transformed the artist’s spatial imagination. This occurred both materially, such as through plexiglass structures like Gateway (1968), and conceptually, leaning further into ideas of social utopia, like Global Village (1971-1972). Environments for the Soul and Art in Science, the latter being the name of a programme Kasuba participated in at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, further display socially-oriented and public environments as well as fabric innovations, like Live-In Environment (1971-1972), built within Kasuba’s studio in New York.
The exhibition’s concluding section, Rock Hill House, explores career highlights, and is a culmination of decades of experimental creative practice. It delves into the story and construction of the Rock Hill House, a residence and studio built in the New Mexico desert from 2001-2005. The curving, quirky structure exemplifies Kasuba’s foray into how the properties of “curved tensile membranes” could be used with metal netting or mesh to widen their applications in housing.
The design is a technical and creative feat that represents a core philosophy threaded throughout Kasuba’s work: transforming space with the purpose of greater social harmony. Rock Hill House was not just a physical dwelling for the creative community, but for the artist herself; Kasuba lived there until 2012. Imagining the Future is thus aptly named and concluded, with the presentation of a truly revolutionary environment and structure, a haven that a younger Kasuba could only have envisioned in her mind. Overall, the exhibition weaves in and out, taking the viewer with it, from Kasuba’s more functional, architectural designs to dreamier, abstract sculptures and visions, whilst highlighting their intersections.
Lubytė states: “Imagining the Future has been put together with the idea of introducing the public to an artist they [may] know nothing about.” Kasuba was a pioneer in male-dominated fields, whether that be architecture, sculpture, design, or the more niche “environment.” Women artists have long struggled for adequate recognition – a fight which becomes harder when their work is difficult to categorise or define. Inesa Brašiškė writes for Mousse how Kasuba’s work “is not easily bracketed within established categories. Situated between craft and science, art and architecture, it is both informed by sensations of her own individual body and as- pirations toward the betterment of ways of living for society at large.” Recently, the group exhibition Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976, at Munich’s Haus der Kunst and MAXXI in Rome, addressed this, showing 11 female artists across countries and generations who contributed to the genre. It included Kasuba along with Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Nanda Vigo, Tsuruko Yamazaki and more. The aim: to plug historical gaps of inequity in the art canon.
This act – of reframing and redressing the balance – reveals how keenly Kasuba’s influence is felt today. South Korean artist, Do Ho Suh, would be a fitting contemporary counterpart. Suh is renowned for constructing architectural sculptures in fabric, whilst drawing on personal memory and history. The Staircase installations recreate the artist’s memories in his parents’ traditional Korean house in Seoul, as well as his modern, westernised apartment in New York. Here, Suh uses scarlet-coloured polyester and steel to erect a gossamer staircase in the sky, as if made by delicate, fine blood vessels. It is beautiful, haunting and nostalgic. Both Suh and Kasuba vivify synthetic fabrics. The parallels between them are potent yet they do branch: where Suh’s work attempts to capture a past in the present, Kasuba’s “wandering” within the environment genre looked towards building possible futures.
Carré d’Art hosts Imagining the Future alongside The Softest Hard, by Vilnius-born artist Marija Olšauskaitė, as part of its Lithuania season. Olšauskaitė is a contemporary artist who works heavily with glass, covering “themes of relationships, openness, intimacy and belonging.” The exhibition interpretation positions Olšauskaitė in relation to Kasuba as “continuing the ideas of her elder sister”, carrying forward a mantle of “affirming the social role of architecture and art.” This pro- gramme champions Lithuanian artists and female practitioners working with sculpture, architecture and design. Lubytė comments on a rise in the appreciation of Lithuanian women artists, especially over the past decade, citing “the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale for Sun & Sea (Marina) by Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainytė, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, and the work of Emilija Škarnulytė and Eglė Budvytytė”, amongst others. Carré d’Art builds on, and champions, this new wave.
“I believe that the evolution of [Kasuba’s] creative path, from classical modernism to a visionary turn towards pre- history and nature, should be understandable and acceptable to an audience tired of the urbanisation and virtuality of the 21st century metropolis,” says Lubytė. Imagining the Future introduces viewers to an artist whose legacy is devoted to understanding and expanding the ways in which physical space can affect our bodies, and how we can fine-tune that relationship for our own individual and collective betterment. At the same time, the show opens audiences to discovering more contemporary artists who engage with these questions today, whilst reconsidering attachments to architecture, space and ideas of home in our own, distinctly volatile, age.
Imagining the Future | Carré d’Art, Nîmes | Until 23 March
carreartmusee.com
Words: Vamika Sinha
Image credits:
1. Aleksandra Kasuba, Imagining the Future at Carré d’Art. Photo © Cédrick Eymenier.
2. Aleksandra Kasuba, Imagining the Future at Carré d’Art. Photo © Cédrick Eymenier.
3. Inside Other Spaces. Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976, Aleksandra Kasuba, Spectral Passage, (1975). Exhibition view Haus der Kunst München, (2023). Photo: Agostino Osio.
4. Aleksandra Kasuba, Imagining the Future at Carré d’Art. Photos © Cédrick Eymenier.
5. Spectrum. An Afterthought, (1975–2014). Synthetic fabric, neon lamps, colored filters, steel, aluminum, plywood, plastic. 400 x 1056 x 539 cm. The Lithuanian National Museum of Art. Photo by Antanas Lukšėnas
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