Vasulka Chamber
Vasulka Chamber
About
The Vasulka Chamber Center for New Media Art is a research center within the National Gallery of Iceland, dedicated to the study, collection, and display of video, digital, audio, and multimedia art in Iceland.
In cooperation with the Vasulka Kitchen Brno and the Vasulka Foundation Vasulka.org, the Vasulka Chamber maintains research materials relating to the life and work of Steina and Woody, including the archive, works of art in the collection, and a reference library.
The Vasulka Chamber is located in the study room of museum's library located at Laufásvegur 12, in Reykjavík. Access is by appointment, by writing to:
elin.gudjonsdottir@listasafn.is
A primary focus of the Vasulka Chamber is to preserve the legacy of Steina and Woody Vasulka, who donated a large part of their archive to the museum in 2014.
Welcoming scholars to the Vasulka Chamber!
The National Gallery extends a warm welcome to Berglind Jóna Hlynsdóttir and Sigríður Regína Sigurþórsdóttir, graduate students who will be working within the Vasulka Chamber archive for the next two years. Their research will focus on time-based media, including works from the National Gallery's collection, as well as the Vasulka Chamber archive that is preserved in the museum's research library. The two newly-created positions fall under the definitions of studies at the doctoral level -- one in artistic practice and the other in art history.
The new research programme in art and art history is under the auspices of the Iceland Academy of the Arts, the School of Humanities at the University of Iceland and the National Gallery of Iceland. In the spring of 2024, the entities received a substantial development grant for two years from the University Collaboration under the auspices of the Ministry of Higher Education, Industry and Innovation. The project managers are Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir, visiting professor at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Ingibjörg Jóhannsdóttir, director of the National Gallery of Iceland, and Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, professor of art history at the University of Iceland.
News
ON VIEW: MIT List Visual Art Center will open of the first solo exhibition of Steina's work in over a decade. Steina: Playback will be on view from October 26, 2024 - January 12, 2025.
History
The Vasulka Chamber / Center for New Media Art (Vasulka-stofa) was founded in October 2014, in a unique partnership between the National Gallery of Iceland and the artists Steina and Woody Vasulka. The Vasulka Chamber was named in honor of the artists, who donated a substantial part of their archive to the museum (Steina added the word chamber (stofa) to the name). The initiative was spear headed by Halldór Björn Runólfsson, then museum director, and Kristín Scheving, then head of the Vasulka Chamber. The opening was timed to coincide with the 130th anniversary of the museum’s founding, and the event was presided over by Iceland's President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson and Culture Minister Illugi Gunnarson.
Vasulka Chamber International Advisory Committee
Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, PhD, is a Professor of Art History, Art Theory, and Curatorial Studies at the University of Iceland. Her research focuses on historiography, contemporary art, the history and theory of photography, visual culture, and curatorial studies. She has published extensively on these topics.
Throughout her career, she has curated numerous exhibitions in Icelandic and European museums and galleries. Notable venues and festivals include Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, National Museum of Iceland, National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík Art Museum, Reykjavík Museum of Photography, the Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art in Vaasa, Finland, Reykjavík Arts Festival, Curated by_ in Vienna, Austria, and Riga European Capital of Culture.
She has collaborated with artists such as Ange Leccia, Snæbjörnsdóttir & Wilson, The Icelandic Love Corporation, Ieva Epnere, Sigurður Guðjónsson, and Ólöf Nordal. Most recently, she co-curated "Søsterskap," an exhibition highlighting women's strong role in the Nordic countries, at Les Rencontres d'Arles 2023. Additionally, she served as the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation Visiting Lecturer at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis in 2022.
Jennifer Helia DeFelice, PhD, is an artist, educator, and curator specializing in the field of art and technology who has long asserted her valuable artistic sensibility in pedagogical and curatorial practice and in co-creating the concepts of artistic events and institutions. She is a founder of Vašulka Kitchen Brno — Center for New Media Art, a legacy project and cultural platform devoted to electronic art pioneers Woody & Steina Vasulka. Her artistic and professional practice focuses on considerations of tacit knowledge acquisition through the documentation of presence and experience inspired by the history and trajectory of video, multimedia and performace art.
Larisa Dryansky, PhD, is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Sorbonne Université. Her research focuses on the intersections of art, science, and technology in postwar and contemporary art, and on technical images (photography, film, video). She is currently completing a book on materiality in postwar and contemporary art, which includes a chapter on the Vasulkas. In addition to her first book, Cartophotographies: De l’art conceptuel au Land Art(2017), she has co-edited several volumes, including recently Repenser le médium: Art contemporain et cinéma (2022), and has published internationally in academic journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogs. From 2014 to 2016, she was Senior Fellow (“Conseillère scientifique”) in charge of contemporary art history programs at the French National Art History Institute (INHA).
Artist Biographies
Steina (née Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir) was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, on January 30, 1940. As a child, she studied violin and music theory, and in 1959 received a scholarship from the Czechoslovak Ministry of Culture to attend the State Music Conservatory in Prague, where she studied until 1963, then continuing with independent studies , first in New York and then in Paris in 1967.
Bohuslav "Woody" Vasulka (1937-2019) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, on January 20, 1937. From 1952 to 1956, he studied metallurgy and mechanics at the industrial engineering school in Brno, where he earned his degree in 1956. Settling in Prague in 1960, he graduated from the faculty of cinema and television at the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU). While pursuing his studies, Woody also wrote poetry, played jazz trumpet and produced short films.
Steina and Woody married in Prague in 1964, and shortly thereafter she joined the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. In 1965 the Vasulkas emigrated to the U.S., settling in New York City. While Steina worked as a freelance musician, Woody began making independent documentaries and edited industrial films. The following year, he collaborated on developing films for a multi-screen environment to be shown in the American Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. In 1969, Woody conducted his first experiments with electronic images and put aside cinematographic forms in favor of video.
From 1969 to 1971, using a Sony Portapak and newly acquired equipment, Steina and Woody amassed video segments documenting the concerts and performances they attended at venues connected with New York's counterculture movement (Automation House, WBAI Free Music Store, Fillmore East). To meet the need expressed by artists for a center to produce and show electronic art, the couple, together with a small team, opened The Electronic Kitchen (later shortened to The Kitchen) in 1971, in what had once been the kitchen of the Mercer Art Center. This artists run organization helped video makers and later musicians, dancers and performers operating outside the mainstream to create their work and present it at venues that favored discussion and experimentation. Steina and Woody ran The Kitchen until 1973.
During that time they also began experimenting with equipment (modulators, video synthesizers, keyers, sequencers) that enabled them to isolate the elements of a visual vocabulary and to build a syntax specific to electronic images. They were artists-in-residence at the National Center for Experiments in Television, at KQED in San Francisco, and at WNET/Thirteen in New York.
In 1973, they were invited to develop the production lab of the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo, a research center devoted to media theory, founded by Gerald O'Grady. Woody Vasulka became an associate professor there in 1974 and Steina in 1976. Both taught at the Center until 1979.
From 1975 to 1977, Steina focused mainly on the series “Machine Vision”, a project examining the mediation of space through technology that included videos and installations. She also began designing feedback devices to reverberate sound waves off video signals and vice versa.
In 1980, Woody and Steina settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was to become their long-term home and a new source of inspirations, interactions and life.
In the eighties, several solo shows devoted to Steina and Woody Vasulka were mounted at museums and art centers in the United States, France, Italy and Japan, and their videos were screened at media art festivals worldwide. At the same time, Steina was working on a series of multi-screen installations highlighting elements of the landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland. In 1986, with help from composer and vocalist, Joan LaBarbara, Steina created a body of works that relied on a sound-image interface. In 1988 Steina was an artist-in-residence in Tokyo on a U.S./Japan Friendship Committee grant.