“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.