Bll Viola (USA)
Selected Works

Barutana, 20:30 i 22:30
July 26., August 16., August 23.

Bill Viola represents one of the central figures of video art. With mastery in the control of video technology, the artist has used video form since the beginning of the 1970s in the exploration of the phenomenon of sensory perception as the road to self cognizance. His work is founded on universal human experiences, such as birth and death, with roots in both eastern and western art, but also in other spiritual traditions, such as zen-budism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism. Over the period of 30 years, Bill Viola has created architectural video installations, sound ambients, electronic music performances, defining video form as the vital form of contemporary art.

The Reflecting Pool is a series of five autonomous works, describing stages of the artist's voyage through the cycles of birth, death and rebirth, pictures of transition from day to night, movement to non-movement, from time to timelessness. Passages recording brain visions and complexity of perception explore the border between the conscious and unconscious experience. The series connects the basic sources of inspiration in the work of Bill Viola - influences of oriental philosophy, phenomenology, scientific theses about memory and light, the theory of relativity, the battle of contradiction.

His video work The Reflecting Pool (1977-79, 12 mins) is founded on the subject of baptism, or spiritual birth (Viola himself appears in the work), Moonblood (1977-79, 12 mins) on the subject of women and the phenomenon of femininity, Silent Life (1979, 13 mins) records the emerging of new life, while the complex work Ancient of Days (1979-81, 12 mins) explores time discovered in sound and vision, with natural and subjective time. Finally, Vegetable Memory (1978,80, 15 mins) explores different levels of perception through a sequence of recordings from a fish market in Tokyo that are repeated continuously.

By naming these works "songs", Viola clearly pointed out the importance of musical structures and the poetics of romantics in his work.

A man who is trying to levitate while lying at a junkyard, in Junkyard Levitation, is a visual wisecrack on the account of the "mind over matter" concept. Songs of Innocence, by directly addressing the visionary romanticism of William Blake, discovers symbolic visions of children, singing, who disappear and reappear again, evoking the complexity of visual relations between memory, sunset and death.

In The Space Between the Teeth, founded on the structure of the phenomenon of acoustics, the film structure of a corridor is a metaphor of transition between two worlds, bridged by cathartic screams of an individual. The final work of this cycle, Truth Through Mass Individuation, successively develops the increasingly aggressive action of an individual, which is culminating with an angry crowd at an open stadium.

As a meditation to the topic of constant blending of the borders of dreams and conscious state, memory and oblivion, life and death, The Passing confronts the observer with claustrophobic and enigmatic pictures, dug out from dark reservoirs of dreams and the unconscious. Pictures of a man (played by Viola) who is sleeping restlessly and breathing heavily, change into dark landscapes of deserts and beaches, pictures of isolated buildings and ruins, people who are sinking in water, the first moves of a new born, the death bed of an old woman and wide images of a tunnel which, as a passage, represents the key elements of this work.

The Passing was created on the basis of the artist's experience of two extreme events, the coincidence of which is almost reconciling life and death – when his mother died at the same time his son was born. An impressive work, combining the basic subject of the artist's opus.

"A line-up of individual pictures based on mortality, decaying, and disintegration, are marked with a long, slow fade to black. Sequences of fruit dropping from a tree, of a candle going out, a family taking a photo, appear as a series of openings or current insights into the fundamental derivations of nature, which, like thoughts, are doomed to fading and disintegrating into oblivion. By lighting the dim border between memory and oblivion with a sort of universal light, the camera moves down a dark concrete tunnel towards the iron bars of a locked gate, where, finally, it breaks through to the world, through a released all-engulfing white light of self-revelation."

(Bill Viola)

Reasons for Knocking on an Empty House represents a powerful and ascetically serious questioning of experiencing one's own personality and body in conditions of complete isolation, over a long time period. The work was created after the artist's attempt to stay awake for three days, shut in a room in an empty house. The static camera recorded the effects of the merciless passage of time on an isolated individual, while subtle transformations of light and sound and the use of a wide lens create a feeling of non-determination of space, distorting the observer's perception of time and space, illusion and reality.

The epic search for self-cognizance, described by Viola as "the exploration of inner states and connection with animal awareness that we carry in ourselves". The title was taken from the Rig-Veda Sanskrit, defining a procession through birth, awareness, primordial existence, intuition, knowledge, rational thought and belief, which leads towards a transcendental reality "outside of the laws of physics".

Organized in five parts, Il Corpo Scuro (The Dark Body), The Language of the Birds, The Night of Sense, Stunned by the Drum and The Living Flame, the work is founded on a metaphysical voyage of the rational and intuitive thought, from nature to spiritual rituals.

By developing powerful, emblemic pictures and allegoric landscapes, Viola articulates the dramatic search for self-cognisance through awareness of the Other, which is embodied here in the form of a Shaman's vision of animal awareness.