Bill Viola Movies

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

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...

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...

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

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...

Viola experimental short

The title of Truth Through Mass Individuation references Carl Jung. An isolated figure is seen performing successively more aggressive actions...

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

Part of Bill Viola's "Transfigurations" series, this work shows a mother and her daughters enacting a transfiguration when they choose to pass...

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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...

2005. Video/sound installation. Performer: Robin Bonaccorsi.

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...

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...

Viola describes The Wheel of Becoming as concerning "the notion of the parallel nature of reality, that is, simultaneous events separated in space."...