In Basin of Tears, two videos are projected side by side on two adjacent screens mounted to the wall. This video diptych creates an incredible imagery, colours and the sensual quality of water are presented vividly, just like in an old master painting. Viewers find themselves in a transcendental...
Part of Bill Viola’s Transfiguration series, The Innocents explores the presence of the dead in the world of the living. The video documents a boy and a girl who slowly approach out of the darkness and into the light. Shown on separate screens, they break through what is, at first, an invisible...
Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier 1979, by incorporating a large body of water, with video and sound recordings of nature, was pioneering in its use of mixed media. It is a meditation on the fragility of nature and our perception of its changes over time. A screen is suspended above a large shallow...
Driven by a quest to capture a landscape reduced to flatness and sky, Viola travels to Chott El-Djerid. The film opens with images of snowy prairies and winter scenes, mirrored by warm, vibrating desert vistas. Through powerful telephoto lenses, shimmering mirages and warped forms emerge under...
Information is an exercise in technological reflexivity, an early investigation of the material presence of the electronic medium. From a technical mistake, in which a videotape recorder tried to record itself, Viola constructed a study of electronic anarchy — a disintegrating and...
Hailed as the "Rembrandt of the Video Age," renowned American artist Bill Viola became the first contemporary artist ever to be featured in a one-man show at London's prestigious National Gallery. This documentary directed by Mark Kidel features rarely seen footage from Viola's own archive and...
With a title referring to Japanese folklore, wherein things done on the first day of a new year are significant, the film - an ardent dream entirely shot in Japan - stands as a spiritual allegory equating light and dark with life and death.
Viola describes The Wheel of Becoming as concerning "the notion of the parallel nature of reality, that is, simultaneous events separated in space." A mandala-like form, divided into four quadrants, unifies four events by four individuals in four separate spaces. These alternately converge and...
Part of Bill Viola's "Transfigurations" series, this work shows a mother and her daughters enacting a transfiguration when they choose to pass through a threshold of water and briefly enter an illuminated realm.
Writes Viola: "A succession of individual images focusing on mortality, decay and disintegration, are delineated by long, slow fades to black. The image sequences — fruit falling from a tree, a candle being extinguished, a family having a flash photograph taken — appear as a series of openings...
Viola describes A Non-Dairy Creamer as "the eradication of the individual by self-consumption." The artist's face, visible only as a reflected image on the surface of a cup of black coffee, slowly disappears as he consumes the coffee.
Junkyard Levitation is a visual pun on the concept of "mind over matter," as a man attempts to levitate while lying prone in a junkyard. Writes Viola, "Scrap metal technology and video technology are united to temporarily break the known laws of science and prove that psychokinesis is valid within...
A drop of water emerging from a small brass valve is magnified by a video camera and projected on a large screen. The close-up image reveals that the viewer and part of the room where they stand are visible inside each forming drop.
The title of Vegetable Memory derives from the writings of Jalaludin Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet. Evolving as what Viola terms a "kind of temporal magnifying glass," the work explores the perceptual phenomenon of repetitive, cyclic viewing. A loop of images recorded at the Tsukiji fish market...
A man sinks down rapidly into the watery depths, but his inevitable and extended ascension's entire sequence, which was only a few seconds in real time, is slowed down into seven minutes of extreme duration, as if he is reaching Heaven.
The three panels of Bill Viola’s triptych show video footage of birth (on the left), death (on the right) and a metaphorical journey between the two represented by a body floating in water (in the centre).
In this artwork, we witness the residue of a life through the objects and structures that surround a solitary older woman: color and black-and-white video triptych on LCD flat panels mounted on wall, 35.5 x 200 x 6 cm.
