Movies:

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 artis...

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....

Video/sound installation featuring two channels of color video projections from opposite walls of a large, darkened gallery; custom video switching program; two channels of amplified mono sound, four speakers....

Two figures are captured in slow motion, walking closely together, across a stretch of the Mojave Desert towards the camera, with no end in sight....

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)...

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....

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

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....

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 l...

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...

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 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)....

This work represents the inevitable separation of father and son as they take separate paths in their life's journey. Two men arrive in the desert under a turbulent sky. They appear at the far extremes of the frame and walk toward us on a trajectory ...

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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....

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 ...

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 sep...

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

"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...

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 af...