Bill Viola Movies

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...

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

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

Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

Created by Bill Viola and Kira Perov and opened in May 2014, Martyrs shows four individuals, across four colour vertical plasma screens, being...

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

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

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...

Video on two flat-screen monitors with sound

Red Tape -- Collected Works Bill Viola 1975, 30 min, color, sound Playing Soul Music to My Freckles 1975, 2:46 min, color, sound A Non-Dairy...

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...

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