Fire runes//Pyroglyphs
Fire runes
1 -3 October 2025
Welcome to the exhibition opening of the work Fire runes by Stein.
Opening on Wednesday, October 1 at 12 -13 in the exhibition space H.264, which is located in the LHÍ video workshop in Laugarnes.
LHÍ's exhibition of the work Pyroglyphs since 1995, there is an exhibition on the occasion of the artist's, Time travel in the Icelandic Museum of Art and the Reykjavík Art Museum, which opens in Hafnarhúsin on October 4.
Photos: Stein Vasulka, Pyroglyphs (1995).By the permission of the artist and BERG Contemporary.
Pyroglyphs
October 1 -3, 2025
Welcome to the exhibition opening of Pyroglyphs by Stein.
Opening on Wednesday, October 1st, from 12 to 1 pm in H.264, located in the LHÍ video workshop in Laugarnes.
The IUA's exhibition of the work Pyroglyphs from 1995 is on the occasion of the artist's exhibition, Time travel at the National Gallery of Iceland and the Reykjavík Art Museum, which opens at Hafnarhús on October 4th.
Photos: Stein Vasulka, Pyroglyphs (1995). Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary.
Steina (Steinunn Briem Bjarnadóttir Vasulka, b. 1940) is an Icelandic visual artist, and an international pioneer of video art. She started her career as a violinist, studying in Prague in 1959 -1964. There she met her husband to be, Woody Vasulka (b. 1937), an engineer and filmmaker, and together they moved to New York in 1965. Discovering the new handheld Sony Portapak in 1969, they worked together on the emerging medium of video.
In 1971, they founded the world's first multimedia center, The Kitchen, in New York, and in 1973 they become faculty members at the first media department at the State University of New York in Buffalo, NY. Steina and Woody are protected as critically important experimental artists and pioneers of video art. Over the years, they have built their own equipment, robots and machines and their work has influenced much of the development of video art itself.
From screens to recording, and from documentary processes to highly complicated experimental works, they have indeed transformed and re-invented themes as artists, and still do.
Steina's work has been exhibited at major museums and festivals around the world, including the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, Berlin Film Festival, Ars Electronica in Linz and The Institute of Contemporary Art
in Boston.
Steina became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1976, and in 1997 she represented Iceland at the Biennale di Venezia. In 2015 Steina was awarded The Order of the Falcon in Iceland and in 2016 she was arrested an honorarium artist salon from the Icelandic government.
Stein Vasulka, Pyroglyphs (1995).By the permission of the artist and BERG Contemporary.”
İTRÁTÓMÁ.,
Stein Vasulka, Pyroglyphs (1995).By the permission of the artist and BERG Contemporary.”
PYROGLYPHS 1994
A Video Environment by Steina In Collaboration with Tom Joyce The initial inspiration for Pyroglyphs was the ancient art of blacksmithing but it soon became a musical treat. . . . In Steina's words: “In 1994 I spent long hours with blacksmith Tom Joyce, videotaping the process of building an iron gate. I found iron gates a little too concrete, so I closed in on the intense and violent nature of materials being manipulated by torches, files, and anvils together of flicker of flames. . Tom and I share a fascination with fire as a phenomenon and as a medium of transmutation.”
Steina videotaped, mostly in closeup, the activities of blacksmithing (hammering, filing, welding, manipulating fire), the phenomenon of fire (flames, sparks, combustions, glowing metals), and various improvised scenes (a wise crushing timber, a stack of books burning, paper and wood being scorched.
Editing this material into three complementary image tracks was relatively easy (the visuals were similar or dissimilar in comparable ways) but the sounds of those images were often too similar or too strident, competing for attention. So the sounds easily accessible above or below; and reverb standards to create echo effects. The sound and certain is "the same and strange" The sound of the disease, often and strange is found in particular, and strange is found. .
PYROGLYPHS is a spectacular meditation on fire. Stein has created a sublime landscape illuminated by the many-hued glow of fevered metals and shows of sparkling scintilla. She makes us feel the hypnotic pull of lambent flames even as our breath is caught by the pre-emptive ignition of the torch, our hearts quoted by the violence of the fore.
