In Dialogue With Machines — And Maybe, With God: Steina Returns To Iceland With Her Biggest Exhibition To Date

“When I became a musician, I was 10 years old,” says Steina Vasulka, born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadóttir, sitting across from me in a museum cafe, waiting for her hot chocolate with a childlike impatience. “They were opening the National Theatre and the first event was a symphony concert. Little did I know, I just went with my papa to see Beethoven’s Symphony Number Seven, and since then, Symphony Number Seven has always been special to me. I think it’s the most beautiful, but I might be the only one — everybody seems to like different symphony.”

“My father took me to every concert,” she continues. “He always bought two tickets in the hope that my mother could make it. But mother used those concert times to lay down and rest a little bit. So, I got to go to an awful lot of concerts as a kid.”

Now at 85, Steina — known mononymously — is an internationally acclaimed video artist and a pioneer of new and digital media. Her retrospective, Steina: Playback, currently on view at the National Gallery of Iceland and the Reykjavík Art Museum, brings her back from the USA, where she spent the past several decades, to Reykjavík, the same city where that ten-year-old girl first discovered the transformative power of music. ​​The exhibition was originally organised by the MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. In Iceland, it was expanded and coordinated by curators Markús Þór Andrésson, Director of the Reykjavík Art Museum, and Pari Stave, Head Curator for Exhibitions at the National Gallery of Iceland.

Photo by Art Bicnick

Islanďanka in Prague

Steina talks about her childhood for a good half an hour, and I don’t interrupt. She picked up the violin early and went to music school — though, as she admits, her parents sent her mostly because they’d never had the chance to go. When it came to regular school, things were always more complicated — it was a “love-hate relationship” as she puts it — “they were always wanting [us] to be able to read and write and those kinds of things I cared not so much about.”

“We will probably understand life and death before we understand what music really is.”

“I always liked old music,” says Steina, gazing dreamily into the distance. “But for those who become a real musician, classical music is on a special shelf. It’s just something so miraculous. We will probably understand life and death before we understand what music really is. It is so special and so amazing.”

Steina admits she would skip school and play all sorts of tricks to do that. Her parents didn’t interfere, and her mom even helped her get a certificate of absence to start school a full year later.

“Later in life, when I started wondering where I had my knowledge from, my so-called wisdom, which maybe wasn’t much, I realised that I had two sisters, almost two years older than me, and the other four years older, and they were fluent in all matters of learning. I used them as my teaching books,” she smiles.

After years of being bored at school, Steina saw an advertisement for a music scholarship in Prague and decided it was for her. Though her parents were terrified — it was behind the Iron Curtain — she went anyway. In Prague, she got free boarding, access to concerts and museums she could never have imagined in Iceland, and firsthand experience of the isolation and aftermath of the war.

Soon, Steina started hanging out with film school students. “There was a guy there, whom I started to talk to by the name of, he didn’t know how to pronounce Woody, so he’d say ‘Wudi,’” Steina smiles, remembering her late husband and long-time collaborator, Bohuslav Vašulka, known as Woody Vasulka.

Even six decades later, Steina’s adventurous spirit shines through. She recounts travelling from Prague to Vienna to buy clothes and essentials, like toilet paper, that were scarce in the Eastern Bloc — and how she mastered the art of sneaking into her favourite concerts without a ticket. “I will just say, first I was swindling myself, like I had always done in Iceland. I started it with the Czechs, and they loved it. ‘Here comes the Icelandic girl,’ they’d just open their arms and tell me to go in and find a chair. To have ticketless existence in Prague is very, very special,” she recalls. To this day, her Czech friends still call her “Islanďanka” — the Icelandic girl.

In 1964, Steina married Woody. Since they wanted to leave Czechoslovakia, he had to get  special permission from the government to marry her. While Woody was waiting for the necessary documents, Steina returned to Iceland and played with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra for almost a year until they could finally leave for the “free world” — the United States.

Experimenting in New York

For the first few years in New York, Steina continued to practise as a violinist, while Woody picked editing and documentary work. “There was basically no video until 1969, and then there was a very important gallery exhibition on video only by a guy called Howard Wise,” she recalls, speaking about TV as a Creative Medium exhibition. “We went to see that exhibition, and we were both very taken.”

“Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik. Everybody. We were very tight, because we were underground.”

Around the same time, Steina and Woody got their hands on a borrowed Sony Portapak, a cutting-edge portable video camera of that time. “Early in the 70s, when it became possible to make videos with this portable camera, Steina and Woody immediately started experimenting with the signal and what could be done to alter the image on the magnetic tape,” says Pari. “Immediately, right out of the box, they were conducting experiments in how to alter the look of the video.”

Over time, they became part of the thriving New York creative community. “Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik…,” says Steina, counting the names of the people they collaborated or hung out with. “Everybody. We were very tight, because we were underground.” Their first-ever exhibition was at Max’s Kansas City, in Steina’s words, “a steakhouse run by a man that we later found out was a heroin addict.” Nevertheless, she speaks of her years in New York with fondness — Soho was just starting out, and neither she nor Woody was ever homeless or hungry; they always managed to find opportunities. Doors would open up for them. “Anybody who lives in New York for a period of time finds it was a fantastic life, even if it was in the 20s or in the 2000s or whatever,” she says. “New York is just a magical place.”

Photo by Art Bicnick

Playback, revisited

Though not entirely new, Steina: Playback in Reykjavík is significantly expanded. “Steina is an important figure that has until now lost visibility in her homeland because she has been living abroad and developing her career internationally,” says Markús, speaking of the idea of doing the large-scale exhibition spanning two locations. “It’s time to honour her work locally, and we wanted to do it in a significant way, in a way that would give a signal from the art world that she is an absolute local hero that we should celebrate.”

“I was in love with the camera and camera possibilities with movement, and Woody was always very interested in [the] cosmos and in the collaboration between arts and sciences.”

The collaboration of two museums allowed for the resources needed for Steina’s large-scale installations. “We were able to bring in over 30 works, and curate them in a way that you can follow the progression and development in her work maybe a little bit more clearly, and also see the various typologies of work that she did — there’s the early documentary work, the early work, the single monitors, the multi-monitors, the projections, the machine vision work,” Pari explains.

The exhibition includes works that are more abstract, interactive, and experimental. Some, like her landscapes, have been altered so extensively that they present an entirely new sense of reality. Video manipulation may be trendy now — glitch effects all over social media — but Steina was working in this space 50 years ago, inventing tools and techniques to manually rework the image. “One of the reasons that the shows are successful is because the works continue to captivate the viewer, even decades later,” says Pari.

Photo by Art Bicnick

Machines and music

As their careers evolved, Steina and Woody started to diverge in focus, working separately more and more. “We drifted slowly apart,” Steina says. “I was in love with the camera and camera possibilities with movement, and Woody was always very interested in [the] cosmos and in the collaboration between arts and sciences.” She stresses it was purely a matter of differing interests, and, even while working apart, “We were always showing together and borrowing from each other, stealing from each other.”

Photo by Art Bicnick

Throughout the years, Steina has continued experimenting with different equipment, but music never became secondary. Take, for example, her Tokyo Four work at the Reykjavík Art Museum, dubbed the “audio-visual equivalent of a string quartet.”

“She is using her immediate environment to take in images and use [them] as resources for her technical renderings, be it changing the signal, fooling around with the signal, or creating compositions with the visual elements that she has through editing, inverting, changing speeds, or some other effects in the visual material as a whole,” Markús explains. “It’s very much a musical piece, an audio piece, as well as a visual piece. She takes in the environment in Tokyo, almost as if she would be taken in the natural scenes in Iceland and in the desert of Santa Fe — taking in the something that needs the eye, and altering it through the machines, through use of the equipment, to create a scenery that’s impossible to see with the human eye.”

Throughout our conversation, we touch on only a fraction of Steina’s life — her childhood, student years in communist Czechoslovakia, and early experiments in New York. Since Woody’s passing in 2019, she has continued to preserve and digitise her works, and still plays the violin. Before her taxi arrives, I ask what she thinks this exhibition is about.

“If I am very brutal and distasteful, I would say it is a dialogue with God,” says Steina. “But I wouldn’t say that, it is too much. Nobody has dialogue with God.”

Steina: Playback is on view at the National Gallery of Iceland and the Reykjavík Art Museum through January 11.