Bill Viola 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...

In A Million Other Things (2), changes in light and sound on the edge of a pond during an eight-hour period from day to night are composed in...

The Quintet of the Astonished shows the unfolding expressions of five actors in such extreme slow motion that every minute detail of their changing...

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...

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

This haunting installment contains a solitary wood chair with headphones attached, facing a television monitor. A man (the artist himself), looking...

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

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

"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...

Déserts was created to accompany a live performance of the work of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1885-1965). The Ensemble Modern,...

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...

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...

The fourth video in the five-part digital-image cycle project "Going Forth By Day" (2002), "The Voyage" features an elderly man who is dying,...

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

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...

Video on two flat-screen monitors with sound

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

A man sinks down rapidly into the watery depths, but his inevitable and extended ascension's entire sequence, which was only a few seconds in real...

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

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...