Bill Viola

Wagner: Tristan und Isolde (2018)

Motivated by the love that bound him to Mathilda Wesendonck, Richard Wagner's composition of Tristan und Isolde goes far beyond any simple operatic gesture. Peter Sellars' production pours oil onto this troubled sea of emotions in an almost dematerialised ...

Mary (2016)

Moving through its five parts, the work describes a cycle of birth through to death, depicting both an eternal, universal Mary, and an earthly Mary representing human life on Earth. ...

Martyrs: Earth (2014)

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) consists of four plasma screens, each showing a single figure who is progressively overwhelmed by the onslaught of a natural force. The experiences of the four individuals are orchestrated together to form a coherent whol ...

Martyrs: Water (2014)

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) consists of four plasma screens, each showing a single figure who is progressively overwhelmed by the onslaught of a natural force. The experiences of the four individuals are orchestrated together to form a coherent whole ...

Martyrs: Fire (2014)

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) consists of four plasma screens, each showing a single figure who is progressively overwhelmed by the onslaught of a natural force. The experiences of the four individuals are orchestrated together to form a coherent whol ...

Martyrs: Air (2014)

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) consists of four plasma screens, each showing a single figure who is progressively overwhelmed by the onslaught of a natural force. The experiences of the four individuals are orchestrated together to form a coherent whol ...

Martyrs (2014)

Created by Bill Viola and Kira Perov and opened in May 2014, Martyrs shows four individuals, across four colour vertical plasma screens, being martyred by the four classical elements. The work has no sound. It lasts for seven minutes. Martyrs was joined i ...

Inverted Birth (2014)

American video artist Bill Viola explores the life cycle as an enveloping whole instead of the hegemonic view of life as a linear progression. The artist considers human beings' existence on earth as a cycle where the beginning and end may be the same. Pro ...

Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity (2013)

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. ...

The Dreamers (2013)

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 Encounter (2012)

A Phrase from Chris (2011)

"Transfiguration refers to a rare process whereby both the substance and essence of an entity is reconfigured. In physical terms, a transfiguration is a change in form, a remodeling of appearance. The word derives from the ancient Greek 'metemorphothe' or ...

The Innocents (2008)

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 ...

Three Women (2008)

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. ...

Ocean Without a Shore (2007)

Offering a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the work documents a succession of people slowly emerging out of darkness and moving into the light, where Viola's figures are like those of a modern day Orpheus. ...

Ablutions (2005)

This diptych opens with the image of two parallel streams of falling water. A female torso moves into the background of the left screen while a male torso mirrors her on the right. Both figures move slowly to the foreground and into the light, cupping and ...

Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (2005)

The ascent of the soul in the space after death as it is awakened and drawn up in a backwards flowing waterfall. ...

The Tristan Project (2004)

A four-hour plus video production inspired by Richard Wagner's oeuvre "Tristan und Isolde" and projected during the opera premiere in Paris, in partnership with Peter Sellars as artistic collaborator, and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. ...

Emergence (2003)

Going Forth By Day (2002)

The film is a five-part projection-based installation, which addresses the complexity of human existence through the themes of individuality, society, death and rebirth. Each video is projected directly onto the wall of the exhibition space, just as paint ...

Fire Birth (2002)

The Path (2002)

The Voyage (2002)

The fourth video in the five-part digital-image cycle project "Going Forth By Day" (2002), "The Voyage" features an elderly man who is dying, surrounded by his family, as a boat below filled with his possessions awaits him. ...

Catherine's Room (2001)

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 sce ...

Surrender (2001)

Installation on two screens where the two characters burst into tears, gradually lowering their heads until their faces touch the water. ...

The Quintet of the Astonished (2000)

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 pow ...

Anima (2000)

Anima, which means "soul" in Latin and is the root of the word animation, is from a series of works inspired by Renaissance paintings of figures against neutral backgrounds. The panels show three people who have been directed to express a series of emotion ...

Eternal Return (2000)

Video on two flat-screen monitors with sound ...

Ascension (2000)

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 Crossing (1996)

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. ...

The Veiling (1995)

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. ...

The Greeting (1995)

Inspired by a painting of the Visitation (1528-29) by the Italian artist Pontormo, The Greeting is a video image sequence involving the interactions between three women that is projected onto a screen mounted to the wall of a dark room. In an industrial ur ...

Déserts (1994)

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 afte ...

The Passing (1992)

Internationally acclaimed and award-winning video installation artist Bill Viola juxtaposes personal pictures of his mother's death with images of his own son's birth to explore foundational and potent themes of beginnings and endings, the cycle of life an ...

The Sleepers (1992)

The Sleepers is a startlingly dark vision of sleeping people suspended under water, unable to make contact with the world outside. Viola describes the work: "Seven 55-gallon metal barrels stand in a darkened room. They are white inside and out and are open ...

Slowly Turning Narrative (1992)

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 Nantes Triptych (1992)

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). ...

Heaven and Earth (1992)

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, ...

Angel's Gate (1989)

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 photograp ...

Sodium Vapor (1986)

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 ...

I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986)

"I Do Not Know What It Is that I Am Like" juxtaposes images of animals, both wild and domestic, and natural environments with human activity as it takes place in an apartment, and during a fire walking ceremony in Fiji. Documentary-style footage is combine ...

Silent Life (1986)

Silent Life records the first hours and days of life through a series of portraits of newborn babies in a hospital nursery. The alienating hospital environment, and the vulnerability of the babies' gestures and expressions, suggests a primal linking of bir ...

Reverse Television - Portraits of Viewers (1984)

"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 ...

Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1983)

Viola experimental short ...

Anthem (1983)

A series of shots depicting "America" are laid over a classic Gregorian Chant recreated through the distortion of a woman's screams. ...

Hatsu Yume (First Dream) (1981)

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. ...

Vegetable Memory (1980)

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 ...

The Reflecting Pool (1979)

Viola's seminal piece, The Reflecting Pool, was made three decades ago on analogue video tape and yet could easily pass for a contemporary digital piece; in it, Viola emerges as central protagonist from a thick forest into a clearing filled by an artificia ...

Moonblood (1979)

Viola describes Moonblood as "an expression of the feminine principle, a work in three parts relating to a personal concept of woman and mother. Day and night converge within the silhouette of a woman at a window — a rushing waterfall in winter, and the ...

Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat) (1979)

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 ...

Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier 1979 (1979)

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 ...

Memories Of Ancestral Power (1977)

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" pro ...

Sweet Light (1977)

Using a camera moving along a predetermined path to create the effect of a simulated zoom, Sweet Light refers to the seduction of illumination, focusing on the phototropic vision of a moth. Writes Viola, "A moth emerges from a discarded letter as the spiri ...

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers (1977)

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers is a collection of works that address the desire to transcend the perceptual and cognitive structures of experience. ...

The Wheel of Becoming (1977)

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 ...

The Morning After the Night of Power (1977)

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 obj ...

Guadalcanal Requiem (1977)

One of Paik's most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II's most devastating battles. ...

He Weeps for You (1977)

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. ...

Truth Through Mass Individuation (1976)

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 ...

The Space Between the Teeth (1976)

The Space Between the Teeth is based on the structure of acoustic phenomena and the psychological dynamics of a man screaming at the end of a long dark corridor. With each successive scream, the camera point of view hurtles at high velocity along the lengt ...

Songs of Innocence (1976)

Songs of Innocence, which directly references the visionary Romanticism of William Blake, is haunted with symbolic transformations, as shifting light is charted through the passage of a day. Images of children singing on a school lawn dissolve and reappear ...

Junkyard Levitation (1976)

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 an ...

Four Songs (1976)

In terming these tapes "songs," Viola references the relation of his work to musical structures and to the poetics of Romanticism. ...

Playing Soul Music to My Freckles So They Won't Get Lonely (1975)

Playing Soul Music to My Freckles is a minimalist performance in which a bare loudspeaker, playing an Aretha Franklin song, is seen on the artist's exposed back. ...

A Non-Dairy Creamer (1975)

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. ...

The Semi-Circular Canals (1975)

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 appe ...

A Million Other Things (2) (1975)

In A Million Other Things (2), changes in light and sound on the edge of a pond during an eight-hour period from day to night are composed in rhythmic variations resembling music. When the sun sets, an individual in the landscape remains the sole visible o ...

Return (1975)

Return is a methodical construction of the approach of an individual towards an unseen goal, which assumes metaphorical significance. Viola moves toward the camera/viewer, pausing every few steps to ring a bell, at which point he is momentarily thrust back ...

Red Tape: Collected Works (1975)

Red Tape -- Collected Works Bill Viola 1975, 30 min, color, sound Playing Soul Music to My Freckles 1975, 2:46 min, color, sound A Non-Dairy Creamer 1975, 5:19 min, color, sound The Semi-Circular Canals 1975, 8:51 min, color, sound A Million Other ...

Information (1973)

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 anarc ...

Bill Viola: The Road to St. Paul's (2017)

Gerald Fox's film documents Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov's odyssey to create two permanent video installations for London's St Paul's Cathedral, Martyrs and Mary, the first art commissions of their kind to be installed in Brita ...

What Is Cinema? (2013)

Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others d ...

Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart (2003)

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 see ...

Going Forth By Day (2002)

The film is a five-part projection-based installation, which addresses the complexity of human existence through the themes of individuality, society, death and rebirth. Each video is projected directly onto the wall of the exhibition space, just as paint ...

The Voyage (2002)

The fourth video in the five-part digital-image cycle project "Going Forth By Day" (2002), "The Voyage" features an elderly man who is dying, surrounded by his family, as a boat below filled with his possessions awaits him. ...

I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986)

"I Do Not Know What It Is that I Am Like" juxtaposes images of animals, both wild and domestic, and natural environments with human activity as it takes place in an apartment, and during a fire walking ceremony in Fiji. Documentary-style footage is combine ...

Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1983)

Viola experimental short ...

The Reflecting Pool (1979)

Viola's seminal piece, The Reflecting Pool, was made three decades ago on analogue video tape and yet could easily pass for a contemporary digital piece; in it, Viola emerges as central protagonist from a thick forest into a clearing filled by an artificia ...

Return (1975)

Return is a methodical construction of the approach of an individual towards an unseen goal, which assumes metaphorical significance. Viola moves toward the camera/viewer, pausing every few steps to ring a bell, at which point he is momentarily thrust back ...