Bill Viola Movies

The rituals and philosophies of indigenous non-Western cultures recur throughout Viola's work. In 1976, he travelled to the Solomon Islands with...

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...

The hands of three generations are seen in this work – a young boy, father, mother and grandmother. Slowly and deliberately, the four pairs of...

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

The video installation's alternation between slow and fast-moving images, as well as soft and loud sounds, represents faltering thought processes. A...

“Transfiguration refers to a rare process whereby both the substance and essence of an entity is reconfigured. In physical terms, a...

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) consists of four plasma screens, each showing a single figure who is progressively overwhelmed by the onslaught of...

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...

This video work is one of a group of pieces known as 'The Passions' which explores human emotions, inspired by early European devotional paintings....

Slowly Turning Narrative includes two projections on a large central rotating screen. One presents images of virtually everything that constitutes...

Information is an exercise in technological reflexivity, an early investigation of the material presence of the electronic medium. From a technical...

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...

Offering a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the work documents a succession of people slowly emerging out of darkness...

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...

Writes Viola: "A succession of individual images focusing on mortality, decay and disintegration, are delineated by long, slow fades to black. The...

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

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...

A four-hour plus video production inspired by Richard Wagner's oeuvre "Tristan und Isolde" and projected during the opera premiere in Paris, in...

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...