Déserts was created to accompany a live performance of the work of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1885-1965). The Ensemble Modern, a contemporary music group based in Frankfurt, commissioned Viola to create a visual score for Varèse's Déserts after discovering notes by the composer...
This video work is one of a group of pieces known as 'The Passions' which explores human emotions, inspired by early European devotional paintings. The five screens show different times of the day – morning, afternoon, sunset, evening and night. Each scene shows the female protagonist at a...
Writes Viola: "Sodium Vapor was recorded over a period of several weeks in the hours between one and five in the morning on the streets of an industrial area in lower Manhattan. The title derives from an interest in the particular qualities of sodium vapor street lighting — its characteristic...
Continuously running video installation: in a small alcove, a wood column extends from the floor and ceiling, with a gap in the center formed by two exposed video monitors facing each other two inches apart, mounted to upper and lower columns respectively, a black-and-white video image on each...
The Quintet of the Astonished shows the unfolding expressions of five actors in such extreme slow motion that every minute detail of their changing facial expressions and movements can be detected. In this piece artist Bill Viola explores the cathartic power within grief, personal suffering, and...
The title of Truth Through Mass Individuation references Carl Jung. An isolated figure is seen performing successively more aggressive actions — dropping a cymbal among a flock of pigeons, firing a rifle in a deserted city street. In the fourth and final stage, his luminous image, spotlit against...
The title of The Semi-Circular Canals refers to the portion of the human ear that regulates balance. Viola constructed a platform on which he and the recording equipment counterbalanced one another, while freely suspended from a large tree. The artist appears to be sitting calmly at the center of...
The rituals and philosophies of indigenous non-Western cultures recur throughout Viola's work. In 1976, he travelled to the Solomon Islands with portable color video equipment, which was then a new technology. The first of two "visionary documentaries" produced during his two-month stay, Memories...
The title of The Morning After the Night of Power refers to a passage of the Koran in which angels descend from the heavens to impart the divine inspiration to followers. The central image of the tape is a blue vase standing motionless on a table. This object is framed by a dramatic interplay of...
Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity
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Two naked, life-sized figures, each around 70 years old, track torches across their aging epidermises as if rooting out the pattern of their pasts. The skin itself becomes a metaphor for lived experience and the prospect of its termination.
Seven vertically mounted screens show seven fully clothed submerged people of different ages, genders and ethnicities floating beneath the surface of a river or lake.
The sculptural video installation consists of nine scrims suspended parallel to one another. Projectors at either end of the row of scrims show images of a man and a woman walking towards each other, crossing in the center and moving apart.
"Reverse Television" was created in the mid-1980's by video artist Bill Viola. The 30-second portraits were about portraiture and the idea of a person staring at the viewer (as the viewer stares at the TV screen). Conceived of as a "micro-series," the work features 42 30-second portraits of...
In terming these tapes "songs," Viola references the relation of his work to musical structures and to the poetics of Romanticism. 4 tapes (Junkyard Levitation, Songs of Innocence, The Space Between the Teeth, Truth Through Mass Individuation)
In this work's left panel, The Crossing (1996), a walking male figure is consumed by fire on a 27-foot vertical plasma screen projection while in the accompanying right panel, The Crossing, Video 2 (1996), the same man struggles under a deluge of water.
Slowly Turning Narrative includes two projections on a large central rotating screen. One presents images of virtually everything that constitutes life, embracing the broadest sweep from birth to death. The other shows a close-up of Viola’s head incanting “the one who lives,” “the one who...
