“Steina: Playback” is the first retrospective in Germany of Steina (b. 1940, Reykjavík, Iceland), a trailblazer of video and media art. A classically trained violinist, Steina turned to video in the late 1960s and approached the medium with musical sensitivity. In her practice, sound generates image or vice versa. Video becomes vibration, a current that translates elements into environments. Carrying rhythm and resonance into her electronic experiments, Steina treats the signal as a medium, transforming perception into something mutable and alive.
Spanning from early documentary experiments to expansive multichannel installations, the exhibition traces Steina’s lifelong pursuit of what she calls “machine vision”: a playful, non-anthropocentric perspective that stretches perception beyond the human. Her practice moved from the landscapes of Iceland into the experimental infrastructures of New York and Buffalo, before resonating across European contexts in dialogue with the most formative institutions of media art.
“Playback” attunes with our programme that listens across generations, where sound and music form a polyphonic backbone to exhibition-making. Steina’s environments unfold like scores: voices fractured into loops, images stretched across rhythmic intervals, landscapes resonating in counterpoint. Each work composes itself in relation; shifting, displaced, polyphonic. Steina’s works remain open, never resolved, carrying their rhythms forward, as echoes in an ongoing score, where art and perception listen, adapt, and are continually reorchestrated.
This exhibition is organised by the MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. It is co-curated by Natalie Bell, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Helga Christoffersen, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Coordinating curators for the Haus der Kunst edition of the exhibition are Lydia Antoniou and Marlene Mützel.
Artist info
Steina
Steina, born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadóttir in 1940 in Iceland, lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She studied violin and music theory in Reykjavík and continued her training at the State Music Conservatory in Prague. After completing her studies, she joined the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. In 1965, she emigrated with Vasulka to New York, where she initially worked as a freelance musician. In 1980, Steina and her partner Woody Vasulka settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Steina has lived and worked since.
Steina’s work has been shown internationally, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (now the Carnegie Museum of Art); the Jonson Gallery, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf; and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.