Exceptional Spaces: The Cosmic Vision of Aleksandra Kasuba

Reflecting on Tate’s transnational vision and its continuing commitment to challenge colonial narratives, Anne Barlow, Director of Tate St Ives, opened the symposium by positioning the work of Aleksandra Kasuba (1923–2019) as a reminder that alternative ways of being and living can always be imagined. This idea guided the day’s conversations towards an ongoing artistic search to understand who we are and what our relationship is with the spaces we inhabit. The symposium also raised a question central to understanding Kasuba’s practice: how might an artist’s relationship to place, identity and belonging transform when displacement becomes part of their story? Kasuba was born in Lithuania, which she was forced to leave following the Nazi and Soviet occupations during and after the Second World War. Deeply shaped by these social and political ruptures, she transformed the experience of displacement into a lifelong investigation of connection, coexistence and new spatial possibilities. Her story also offered an important reflection on the many women artists whose voices and contributions have historically remained overlooked, despite creating works that challenged the boundaries of their time.

Following Barlow’s introduction, Elona Lubytė, art historian and curator of the Lithuanian Contemporary Sculpture Collection at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, offered a more intimate understanding of Kasuba, shaped by her research and her personal relationship with the artist. Extending the conversation around identity and displacement, Lubytė reflected on Kasuba’s early drawing The Little Man 1950, presenting the solitary nomadic figure as a recurring motif throughout her career; a figure constantly moving, transforming and searching for belonging. This sense of displacement underpinned a lifelong search for Kasuba: an attempt to understand the relationship between the inner self and its surroundings, moving beyond the physical world towards questions of energy, invisible forces and new possibilities of being.

At the centre of Kasuba’s practice was a belief in the possibility of harmonious living, raising a larger question of whether architecture could move beyond shelter and become a system of relation. Her transition from the natural landscapes of Lithuania to the urban rhythm of New York further influenced her search for alternative spatial environments, leading her to reject the right angle both as a symbol of rigidity rarely found in nature, and as a reflection of the oppressive social and political structures she had witnessed. Through experimenting with stretched fabrics, Kasuba explored architecture not simply as a structure, but as a social and spiritual instrument. Works such as The Live-In Environment 1971–2 became one of the early expressions of these investigations, demonstrating the possibilities of stretched fabric as a medium for creating fluid and responsive spaces. As her experiments continued to evolve, Kasuba expanded these environments through the integration of colour and sound, seeking to navigate not only physical movement but also emotional and psychological experiences. These visionary environments reveal an artist constantly searching for alternative ways of experiencing reality, perhaps creating worlds beyond the structures that could no longer contain her. In harmony with her belief in coexistence and collective creation, Kasuba often collaborated with local artists and students, allowing the process of making itself to become a shared environment.

The legacy of Kasuba’s ideas and spatial investigations can be traced within the practices of many contemporary artists, designers and architects today. Following Lubytė’s presentation, a panel of artists and architects reflected on their own works and the creative processes behind them. One of the most compelling threads emerging from the symposium was how practices born from different contexts seemed to converge around similar questions, almost suggesting a form of collective consciousness. Beyond visual similarities, what connects these works is perhaps a cybernetic understanding of space; that environments are not passive containers, but active systems shaped through continuous feedback between bodies, materials, perception and their surroundings.

Liz West, for instance, is an artist who approaches colour as a way of constructing environments that reflect how she wishes to experience the world. Although driven by a different intention, her work resonates with Kasuba’s understanding of colour as a force capable of shifting perception and emotional experience. Similarly, designer Nikola Radeljković’s playful experiments with tape structures explore creativity through elasticity, tension and deformation, revealing material as an active collaborator in shaping space. Meanwhile, Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds (best known through their collaborative architectural and spatial practice, Pa.LaC.E) investigate environments informed by natural systems, creating immersive conditions where relationships between people, behaviour and surroundings can unfold. Together, these practices suggest that Kasuba’s questions remain alive today, indirectly, through a continued search for spaces that allow for new forms of connection and coexistence.

It is difficult to fully understand Kasuba’s architectural environments without considering her relationship with cybernetics and her search for invisible systems of exchange. In a conversation between Lucia Pietroiusti (Head of Research & Emergence at the future Hartwig Museum in Amsterdam) and Nina Wexelblatt (Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside), the audience was invited into a deeper question within Kasuba’s practice: what systems exist beyond the visible structures of architecture? Rather than approaching spirituality as an escape from reality, Kasuba used it as a method of investigating the unseen forces that shape our relationship with our environment. For her, harmonious living went beyond designing for the physical body and involved understanding the energetic, emotional and relational systems that connect us to our surroundings. Her attempt to echo natural forms through human-made structures reflected a broader search for ways of living that do not separate us from nature and surrounding systems. Her perceptual environments were designed not simply to contain us, but to actively transform how we feel, move and exist within them. As Pietroiusti suggested, ‘to have biological form is to mean we are belonging’. Her words offer a key to understanding Kasuba’s practice, which sought to cultivate a sense of participation. For Kasuba, the world was never just a collection of static objects, but a constantly shifting network of energies and relationships.

Although her approach may first appear intangible, Kasuba’s dedication to documentation – from recording her dreams for over forty years to developing symbols that communicate invisible forces – reveals a deeply grounded effort to understand existence. Rather than pursuing progress without questioning what kind of existence it creates, Kasuba asked a more foundational question: what do the body, mind and spirit need before we build? In this sense, her practice shifted attention away from architecture defined only by economic value or physical usefulness, and towards a more essential question of coexistence between humans and nature. This reciprocity – space shaping us, as much as we shape it – is itself an expression of the coexistence Kasuba sought between people and their surroundings. The purpose of space is not only what we do within it, but what the space does to us – a proposition she continued to explore through works such as her 1970 text Utility for the Soul, a kind of artistic manifesto in which Kasuba proposed a system for reversing the damage caused by a mechanised and neglected society through enlightened corporations. While Kasuba sought to restore a sense of belonging between humans and their environment, her work also raises a difficult question: can our relationship with nature ever be truly unmediated, or is it always shaped through the spaces we create?

Kasuba’s exploration of the relationship between visible and invisible forces found another expression in Spectral Passage, commissioned for The Rainbow Show, an experimental exhibition held across museums and cultural institutions in San Francisco in 1975. The work marked an important moment in her artistic journey, expanding her investigation of sensory environments where colour, form and movement came together to shape human perception. Marina Pugliese, co-curator of the recreation of Spectral Passage for Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists 1956–1976 (2023–4) at Haus der Kunst in Munich, reflected on the process of rebuilding Kasuba’s immersive environment and the challenge of reconstructing not only its physical structure but the sensations and invisible qualities that once brought it to life. Pugliese’s reflection raised a complex question of reconstruction: how can we rebuild an environment whose essence lies not only in its physical form, but in the sensations and experiences it creates? Referencing F. Lanier Graham’s cult text The Rainbow Book (1975), Pugliese highlighted how Kasuba’s approach to space-making was guided by the interaction between colour, form and the human body, creating environments designed to be experienced as well as observed. An archival television review of the original exhibition revealed an interesting tension: while some art critics struggled to categorise the work, visitors formed a strong connection with the experience. This contrast perhaps exposed the limitations of the critical frameworks of the time, which privileged visual interpretation and theoretical categorisation over embodied, multisensory experience. In this sense, Kasuba's environments invited forms of perception beyond the physical world.

Alongside Pugliese, Adomas Narkevičius (Founding Director of Upė Foundation) brought a contemporary perspective through his recent research on Untamed Fashion Assemblies (UFA) – a series of experimental events held in Riga between 1990 and 1999 that were initiated by alternative fashion designer Bruno Birmanis – presented in the Latvian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Reading Kasuba’s space-making alongside UFA’s gathering practices, he drew attention to the shared interest in creating spaces that exist between definitions: environments formed through participation, exchange and collective presence, where fashion became performance, exhibitions became social encounters, and audiences became active participants rather than passive spectators.

Narkevičius’s reflection suggested a shift in Kasuba’s practice from filling space towards making space, where environments become living systems rather than static forms. Despite their different contexts, both Kasuba and UFA emerged from periods when existing social and political structures were being fundamentally reshaped. For Kasuba, this was the experience of displacement after the Second World War; for UFA, the cultural uncertainty following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both practices respond to uncertainty through imagination and togetherness, approaching utopian thinking as a tool for testing possible futures and new forms of collective existence.

The panel concluded with artist Sanchit Bembi’s reflection on his own practice, shaped by his unique sensory perception through synaesthesia and Visual Snow Syndrome (a neurological condition that causes persistent visual disturbances). His work opened another question that closely resonates with Kasuba’s investigations: can art become a way of entering and understanding experiences beyond our own perception? Through creating works that translate the way he sees and senses the world, Bembi invites viewers into alternative ways of experiencing reality. In this sense, his practice shares a connection with Kasuba’s belief that environments can expand our understanding of ourselves and others. As Bembi reflected, Kasuba’s works are to be lived with, not just seen.

The symposium ultimately returned to the question that seemed to follow Kasuba throughout her life: are different ways of living possible? Decades after Kasuba was forced to leave her homeland, artists, architects and designers continue to develop new ways of responding to changing social, spatial and ecological conditions. This ongoing search is perhaps what makes her work remain so relevant today – as an invitation to question, imagine and shape possibilities collectively.

Kasuba’s practice reminds us that while it might be easier to imagine dystopian futures, there is also value in believing that alternative and more hopeful realities can exist. Her commitment to utopian thinking was not a rejection of reality, but a method of rebuilding our relationship with it. The echoes of Kasuba’s ideas within contemporary practices today point towards a shared way of thinking, with artists across different contexts returning to similar questions of belonging, perception and our relationship with the environments we inhabit. Perhaps these similarities exist not because artists are repeating one another, but because they are drawing on a collective memory – an accumulation of knowledge, instinct and ways of perceiving the world, passed down over time. This resonates closely with Kasuba’s own practice, which sought a return to fundamental ways of being that allow us to coexist more closely with one another and our surroundings, and speaks to the intangible connections that interested her throughout her life.

Overall, the symposium achieved what it set out to do by demonstrating that Kasuba’s work belongs to ongoing conversations about how we inhabit space, relate to one another, and imagine more sustainable and collective futures. Rather than presenting her practice as a completed legacy, the discussions revealed it as an evolving framework through which contemporary artists, architects and thinkers continue to reconsider the possibilities of living differently. Kasuba’s search to reconnect with these fundamental relationships, between humans and the environments we inhabit, was not a refusal of technology, science or progress; instead, it was a call to build upon them with greater awareness of what we already are: beings shaped by one another and by the environments we inhabit. By encouraging us to recognise the interconnected relationships between people, nature and the environments we create, Kasuba’s work reminds us that lasting progress depends on understanding them as part of a whole.