Bill Viola Movies

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

This video work is one of a group of pieces known as 'The Passions' which explores human emotions, inspired by early European devotional paintings....

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

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...

In this work's left panel, The Crossing (1996), a walking male figure is consumed by fire on a 27-foot vertical plasma screen projection while in the...

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...

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....

Gerald Fox’s film documents Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov’s odyssey to create two permanent video...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

Installation on two screens where the two characters burst into tears, gradually lowering their heads until their faces touch the water.

Inspired by a painting of the Visitation (1528-29) by the Italian artist Pontormo, The Greeting is a video image sequence involving the interactions...

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...

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