Bill Viola Movies

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...

Viola describes A Non-Dairy Creamer as "the eradication of the individual by self-consumption." The artist's face, visible only as a reflected image...

Junkyard Levitation is a visual pun on the concept of "mind over matter," as a man attempts to levitate while lying prone in a junkyard. Writes...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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...

Viola's seminal piece, The Reflecting Pool, was made three decades ago on analogue video tape and yet could easily pass for a contemporary digital...

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...

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history,...

American video artist Bill Viola explores the life cycle as an enveloping whole instead of the hegemonic view of life as a linear progression. The...

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

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

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

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.