More than a decade after the last exhibition featuring her works, Steina is staging a comeback with a full-fledged retrospective that opened in October at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Organized with the collaboration of Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the essence of this retrospective is evoked with the title Steina: Playback, and showcases her most prominent experiments in video spanning from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Steina (born as Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir) first took up a video camera – a Sony Portapak – in 1970, while she was living in New York with her husband, Woody Vašulka. The training that she received as a classical violinist in Reykjavik and Prague predisposed her towards applying her musical conception of the world to the medium of video. Unlike many of her colleagues who defined their work in relation to American television culture, the Icelandic artist shifted her focus away from human perception as the main driving force of video, instead striving to uncover the luxuriant and utopian potential of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.”

Steina, Geomania (still), 1987. Two-channel video matrix installation, color, sound, 15 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary.

For this retrospective MIT List is showcasing more than a dozen single-channel works, several multi-monitor arrays and multi-channel environments which are representative of Steina's DIY approach, documenting how her works were shaped by the shifting environments in which she operated. In Violin Power (1970-1978), Steina demonstrates “how to play video on the violin,” utilizing the instrument’s audio frequency to manipulate the video output in a stark reversal, with the analog undermining the digital realm. The installation Allvision, consisting of two cameras affixed to a turntable orbiting a central reflective orb, brings to the forefront her concept of “machine vision,” i.e. a machine-centered approach to image generation.

Steina has been actively creating in the field of moving images since the 1970s. She participated in the founding of The Kitchen, a legendary artist-driven space that presents programs centered around a kunsthalle model and provides opportunities for artists to engage in innovative and experimental creativity. Steina: Playback will be on display at MIT List until January 12, 2025. The exhibition will travel to Buffalo AKG Art Museum in March 2025. You can read more about Steina: Playback and other ongoing events at MIT List on their site.

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