Playback
October 26, 2024–January 12, 2025
The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents the first US museum solo exhibition in over a decade by the pathbreaking video artist Steina (b. 1940, Iceland).
Opening October 26, Steina: Playback marks the artist’s first US museum solo exhibition since 2011, showcasing her pioneering works.
Organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the exhibition will be on view across the List Center’s galleries from October 26, 2024–January 12, 2025, and at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum from March 14–June 30, 2025. In October 2025, it will travel to Iceland, where an expanded version of the show will be jointly hosted by the Reykjavík Art Museum and the National Gallery of Iceland.
Since cofounding The Kitchen in New York City in 1971, Steina’s dynamic practice has traversed video, performance, and installation through an experimental approach to electronic processing tools, persistent explorations of what she calls “machine vision,” and an enduring ethos of play. Unlike many of her peers working in video in its early decades, the Icelandic-born artist did not consider US television culture a central force against which her video activity was defined. Instead, human perception was a key site of confrontation as she sought the exuberant and even utopian possibilities of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.”
Highlighting works from 1970–2000, Playback traces Steina's work across three critical decades of video art and follows her trajectory from downtown New York's avant-garde and Buffalo's experimental media arts scene of the 1970s, to the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland. With more than a dozen single-channel works, as well as multi-monitor arrays and multi-channel environments, this focused retrospective surveys Steina's fearless DIY approach to new media and her pioneering synthesis of the electronic and the natural. While Steina's early collaborative works with her life partner Woody Vasulka centered largely around the pair's obsession with video's signal and the custom-designed hardware that could distort and manipulate it, her independent works from 1975 onward probe the limits of human perspective and pursue non-anthropocentric modes of visualizing the natural world. With her distinctive translation of musical modes, like polyphony, into the visual realm and her efforts to exceed human perception, Steina reveals an electronic sublime and attunes us to the vibrant, invisible energies inherent to both video and natural phenomena.
This exhibition is co-curated by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
The exhibition catalogue, Steina, co-published with MIT Press and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, will be released in spring 2025. Edited by Bell, and designed by Katy Nelson, it features lead essays by Ina Blom, Joey Heinen, and Gloria Sutton; an interview with the artist; and a roundtable conversation with scholars and curators reflecting on Steina’s legacy. Plate section texts by List Center Curatorial Assistant Zach Ngin narrate various themes that endure across Steina’s oeuvre: System Performance, Tools, Signals, Machine Vision, and Ecology.
About the artist
Steina (b. Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, 1940, Iceland; lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico) trained as a violinist in Reykjavík and Prague and emigrated to New York City in 1965 with her life partner, Woody Vasulka. Initially working as a freelance musician, she began to focus on video in 1970, and in 1971, cofounded The Electronic Kitchen (later The Kitchen), the legendary multidisciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art space in New York City. After moving to Buffalo in 1973, Steina helped develop the production lab at the Center for Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo.
Steina has shown at leading institutions internationally, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (now the Carnegie Museum of Art); Jonson Gallery, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Important collections with her work include the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Canada, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Julia Stoschek Foundation, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Awards and grants include: Rockefeller Foundation and NEA grants (1982); the Maya Deren Award (1992); the Siemens Media Arts Prize from ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (1995); as well as an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute (1998).
Exhibition support
Major support for Steina: Playback is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Audrey & James Foster, Idee German Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Sara-Ann & Robert Sanders. The catalogue is made possible through the support of BERG Contemporary, Rejkjavík; the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; Lucy Moon-Lim; and the Jane E. Farver Memorial Fund.
Additional support has been provided by generous donors to the 2023 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Board Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
Events
Steina in conversation: October 25, 2024, 5:30pm
Opening reception: Steina: Playback: October 25, 2024, 6:30pm
Graduate student talk: Nikhil Singh: November 7, 2024, 5:30pm
Graduate student talk: Manaswi Mishra: November 21, 2024, 5:30pm
