Movies: Bill Viola

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

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 vis...

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 re...

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 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)....

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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 hands of three generations are seen in this work – a young boy, father, mother and grandmother. Slowly and deliberately, the four pairs of hands are shown forming a series of predetermined movements. These are taken from sources as diverse as Bud...

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....

"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," th...

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....

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 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....

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 ti...

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...

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....

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 coheren...

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 ...

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 ar...

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....