Martyrs: Fire

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, surrounded by his family, as a boat below filled with his possessions awaits him.

The ascent of the soul in the space after death as it is awakened and drawn up in a backwards flowing waterfall.

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles.

The Space Between the Teeth is based on the structure of acoustic phenomena and the psychological dynamics of a man screaming at the end of a long dark corridor. With each successive scream, the camera point of view hurtles at high velocity along the length of the hallway in decreasing increments. The corridor and the cinematic structuring of the camera's advance act as metaphors for passage and transition between two worlds, bridged by the individual's cathartic screams. Ultimately, the image of the man at the end of the corridor is transformed into a Polaroid still that is literally washed away.

Driven by a quest to capture a landscape reduced to flatness and sky, Viola travels to Chott El-Djerid. The film opens with images of snowy prairies and winter scenes, mirrored by warm, vibrating desert vistas. Through powerful telephoto lenses, shimmering mirages and warped forms emerge under extreme heat and light. These visuals evoke a space where dream and waking reality merge. Viola’s journey transcends documentation, transforming viewing into a reflective exploration of the limits of perception.

Déserts was created to accompany a live performance of the work of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1885-1965). The Ensemble Modern, a contemporary music group based in Frankfurt, commissioned Viola to create a visual score for Varèse's Déserts after discovering notes by the composer referring to an unrealized image component of his composition. The resulting film/videotape was produced with the European television stations ZDF/Arte. In October 1994 Viola's Déserts premiered in a live performance in Vienna with conductor Peter Eötvös and the Ensemble Modern.

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 piece; in it, Viola emerges as central protagonist from a thick forest into a clearing filled by an artificial pool. As the noise of an aeroplane slowly passes and fades overhead, Viola approaches the edge of the pool, whereby he removes his shoes, squats down yelling and then prepares to make a powerful jump.

A small crowd of people are gathered in wait when they are suddenly struck by a massive onslaught of water.

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 boy and a girl who slowly approach out of the darkness and into the light. Shown on separate screens, they break through what is, at first, an invisible threshold of water, suggestive of a passage from the spiritual world into a physical plane of existence. Once incarnate, however, all beings realize that their presence is finite, and so the figures eventually turn away from material existence to return from whence they came.

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. The skin itself becomes a metaphor for lived experience and the prospect of its termination.

Seven vertically mounted screens show seven fully clothed submerged people of different ages, genders and ethnicities floating beneath the surface of a river or lake.

The film is a five-part projection-based installation, which addresses the complexity of human existence through the themes of individuality, society, death and rebirth. Each video is projected directly onto the wall of the exhibition space, just as paint from a fresco adheres to the surface of a plaster wall.

A four-hour plus video production inspired by Richard Wagner's oeuvre "Tristan und Isolde" and projected during the opera premiere in Paris, in partnership with Peter Sellars as artistic collaborator, and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Motivated by the love that bound him to Mathilda Wesendonck, Richard Wagner’s composition of Tristan und Isolde goes far beyond any simple operatic gesture. Peter Sellars’ production pours oil onto this troubled sea of emotions in an almost dematerialised setting bared of all earthly contingencies whilst Bill Viola presents the lovers’ initiatory quest for nirvana in videos detached from the stage, suspended like altarpieces.

The hands of three generations are seen in this work – a young boy, father, mother and grandmother. Slowly and deliberately, the four pairs of hands are shown forming a series of predetermined movements. These are taken from sources as diverse as Buddhist mudras (defined ritual or symbolic gestures) and 17th-century English chirologia tables, which illustrate hand gestures that accompany emotional states. Viola explains that the work is “a timeline that encompasses both the parallel actions of the individuals in the present moment and the larger movements of the stages of human life.” It is part of a series called 'The Passions', which is inspired by early European devotional paintings and explores human emotions.