Bill Viola Movies

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Using a camera moving along a predetermined path to create the effect of a simulated zoom, Sweet Light refers to the seduction of illumination,...

Songs of Innocence, which directly references the visionary Romanticism of William Blake, is haunted with symbolic transformations, as shifting light...

The Sleepers is a startlingly dark vision of sleeping people suspended under water, unable to make contact with the world outside. Viola describes...

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

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....

Video on two flat-screen monitors with sound

In terming these tapes "songs," Viola references the relation of his work to musical structures and to the poetics of Romanticism. 4 tapes (Junkyard...

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

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

Inspired by a painting of the Visitation (1528-29) by the Italian artist Pontormo, The Greeting is a video image sequence involving the interactions...

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

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...