MUNICH.- “Steina: Playback” traces more than five decades of work by an artist considered foundational to the history of video art. A classically trained violinist, Steina (b. Steinunn Briem Bjarnadóttir, 1940, Reykjavík, Iceland) took up the medium of video in 1970, approaching the camera as a musical instrument guided by what she has called the “majestic flow of time.” Image and sound become exchangeable in her work: the electronic signal is simultaneously image and sound, the apparatus simultaneously tool and agent. Coming from the world of music, she brought qualities of play and performance to her sense of composition and to the interfacing of musical instruments and video imaging tools in real time.
Playback, repetition, and the looped temporalities of the medium have long structured how Steina has presented her work. At Haus der Kunst, the exhibition unfolds not as a chronology but as an orbit through Steina’s cosmos: her invented tools, projected environments, and the long collaborations that have shaped her practice. Images turn, re-enter, and recirculate across time, carried by the circular motion, rotation, feedback, and return that recur throughout her work. From voice to signal to system, it follows sound, liveness and technology as forces that move through her practice. Spanning twenty-one works, ranging from early documentary experiments from the late 1970s to large-scale projected environments, the exhibition includes Outer Cosmos (2026), Steina's most recent work completed and presented for the first time here. The work extends Orbital Obsessions (1975–77) by returning to that footage decades later. A self-portrait recorded in Steina’s Buffalo studio, in which multiple camera views are layered, fed back, and multiplied, is now placed at the centre of a wider spherical image space, with the original source material recirculated around it.
Since the early 1970s, Steina has been central to the formation of video as an artistic field. In 1971, with her life partner Woody Vasulka, she co-founded The Kitchen in New York, a venue for expanded forms of image, sound and live practice. It grew out of informal gatherings in their 14th Street studio. The Kitchen became a shared working environment for an emerging community of video makers, visual artists and experimental composers, among them Joan Jonas, La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, whose practices held performance, sound and the moving image in close relation. The department of Learning and Engagement at Haus der Kunst draws on this collaborative ethos in a programme of public encounters built around shared tools, play and open knowledge.
"Steina: Playback” 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 at Haus der Kunst are Lydia Antoniou and Marlene Mützel.
