Katarina Burin
September 23, 2025

When she was a child, Katarina Burin escaped communist Czechoslovakia with her family on the pretense of going on vacation. This transformational moment was foundational in a practice that engages the intersections of architecture, sculpture, drawing, research, and memory. Her process involves delving deep into discrete bodies of work, translating ideas into elegant, slightly uncanny, forms. One of her earlier endeavors was a creative research project about the underrepresented Czech architect Petra Andrejova-Molnár—a woman who, despite limited opportunities, managed to create her own body of work in community with other architects and designers in the interwar period. Burin’s most recent works, collectively called “For the Benefit of Tourism,” are a meditation on tourist propaganda made for and consumed by residents of Eastern Bloc countries. Like all of her work, these pieces explore the connections between history, communication, politics, fact, fiction, and form. We discuss all of this as well as anti-monuments, communism, public and private space, and all the different places Burin has lived. Fittingly, her playlist is an upbeat, eclectic, thoroughly international selection of songs that is perfect for working in the studio! Burin’s work truly rewards extended looking and thinking—find it at www.katarinaburin.studio

Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.

1. I Want You To Know Me, White Light, 2021
   
2. La bataille de neige, Domenique Dumont, 2015
   
3. John Says, Leslie Winer, 2012
   
4. I Opened A Bar, Sophie Hunger, 2018
   
5. One warm spark, Colleen, 2017
   
6. Summer On A Solitary Beach, Franco Battiato, 1981
   
7. Parola, Anna Caragnano &Donato Dozzy, 2015
   
8. Tamo Daleko, Branko Mataja   
   
9. Bebé Durmiendo Cumbia, Elijah Minnelli, 2019
   
10. Bird, Kelly Lee Owens, 2017
    
11. 2nd Thought, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, 1980
    
12. Damn That Valley, U.S. Girls, 2015
    
13. What's Fruit? - Candie Hank Version, Schlammpeitziger & Candie Hank, 2014
    
14. Poplar, K. Yoshimatsu, 2024
    
15. Transitions, Faizal Mostrixx, 2022
    
16. Karaköy, Brazilian Girls, 2018
17. Love's Coming on Strong, Hot Chocolate, 1975
18. The Sound Of This Place - Ypsigrock Festival 2021; Camilla Sparksss, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Eva Geist; 2021

Working in museum, gallery, public space, and the space of existing and imagined architecture, Katarina Burin often reconsiders narratives both historical and personal. Using archival material and invented forms, true stories, and imperfect memories—Burin blends fact and fiction sometimes in equal measure—to produce installations, images and objects that are at times functional, at times fantastical, occasionally commemorative, and often mysterious, playing with levels of subtlety and immersiveness.

Katarina Burin received her BFA from University of Georgia and MFA from Yale University and is currently associate senior lecturer at Harvard University’s department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies. She was awarded a Guggenheim in 2025.