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, theater, 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 ongoing investigations into how moving images and perception play within and through architectural forms. The publication includes texts by authors Stephanie Cristello (editor), Irena Haiduk, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Humberto Moro, and Mimi Zeiger.

Stephanie Cristello is an independent curator and author based in Chicago, Illinois. Her writing has been published in ArtReview, BOMB Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Frieze, Mousse, OSMOS, PIN—UP, and Portable Gray, published by the University of Chicago Press, where she was recently named editor-at-large. From 2020–21, she was a curatorial advisor to the Busan Biennale (South Korea) as well as a guest curator at Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark) and the Malmö Art Museum (Sweden). She is the author of Theodora Allen: Saturnine (Motto/Kunsthal Aarhus, 2021), Sustainable Societies for the Future (Motto/Malmö Art Museum, 2021), and Barbara Kasten: Architecture and Film 2015–2020 (Skira, 2022). She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 with a liberal arts thesis from the Visual Critical Studies department.