Bill Viola

Bill Viola is an American artist born in 1951. He is internationally recognised and was seen as influential to the establishment of video in contemporary art, his works being shown in museums and galleries all over the world. His works involve ‘videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast’. His work often focuses on universal human experiences such as birth, death and the unfolding of consciousness, trying to explore the sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His videos communicate to a wide audience by using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories.

Viola has been involved in the Kaldor Projects in both 2008 and 2010. In 2008, two works from Viola’s 2005 series The Tristan Project were presented nightly at St Saviour’s Church in Redfern, Sydney. The darkened church was lit with a larger-than-life projection of Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall), the memorizing images accompanied by sound. After the presentation in Sydney for Project 17 in 2008, these works were installed again for a second time for Project 21, inside a church in Parkville, Melbourne. A second work, The Raft, was also presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as part of the project.

 

 

Fire Woman
Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall)