SALZBURG.- Bill Viola (1951, New York, NY, US) is one of the most renowned video artists of our time. His visual worlds, realized with state-of-the-art technology, are impressive for their contemplative balance and overwhelming with their direct emotionality and pictorial intensity. They push the boundaries of conventional viewing habits shaped by the everyday floods of images in film, television, and social media. The focus of his visually stunning works is on the human condition; they create immersive worlds of experience that confront the viewer with the basic conditions and potentials of human existence and address essential themes such as life and death, dream and rebirth, memory and oblivion, transformation and transfiguration. Produced in close collaboration with the Bill Viola Studio, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg’s solo exhibition is the first presentation of Viola’s imposing oeuvre at an Austrian museum.

Viola, who has been intensely concerned with the human body, divergent temporal orders, spirituality, and transcendence since the 1970s, has rightly been described as a “postmodern humanist” (David A. Ross). He maintains an intensive dialogue with non-Western art, music, and religion and conceives his brilliantly composed works both as a reflection on the locating of human existence in the world and as an exploration of the conditions of possibility of human consciousness. Viola’s spiritual openness to Eastern thought allows him to create works of strikingly powerful, visionary poetry that combine the spiritual with the aesthetic without drifting into neo-religious dogmatism. The tradition of Western painting—especially the influence of major Renaissance artists—is of great importance for Viola’s work, which focuses on the artistic exploration of the moving image. At the same time, he manages to transcend our perception of the real world by means of advanced video techniques such as slow motion, time lapse, dissolves, and micro and macro shots. Especially in uncertain and disturbing times, Viola’s works are of great relevance, as they are based on an underlying idea of hope and solidarity.

His 2004 video projection The Raft, for example, which shows in extreme slow motion a group of people being overwhelmed by a violent torrent of water, is a universal metaphor for the threat to human life. In this depiction of the suffering of the global community, it was important to the artist—as he noted in a statement—that all those “shipwrecked” survived: “no one is lost.”

“Many of Viola’s works refer to this difficult-to-access ‘inner space’ of human experience, to what is ‘sleeping’ at the bottom of our souls and makes our lives what they are,” writes philosopher Otto Neumaier in his introduction to the publication accompanying the exhibition. “To varying degrees, his works let us come closer to this space.” In Three Women (2008), water forms both the outer and inner space, as shadowy human figures come toward us behind an initially barely perceptible wall of water, then move through it and face us in their natural colorfulness, before returning again to behind the wall of water. Three Women is part of the Transfigurations series, a group of works that reflect on the passage of time and the process by which a person’s inner being is transformed. In the context of this work, Neumaier refers to the Sufi mystic Ibn al ‘Arabi, who described life as an endless journey: “The self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no beginning or end, in this world and the next.” Three Women expresses this profound vision of the eternal nature of human life.




In Viola’s work, certain subjects (such as the elements earth, water, air, and fire, landscapes, plants, animals, humans, the artist himself, members of his family) not only appear repeatedly but are, in some cases, obvious references to other own works. One such “strand of themes” (Neumaier) running through Viola’s work are images of people diving into or floating in water, as in installations like Five Angels for the Millennium (2001). In an earlier work, The Reflecting Pool (1979), Viola’s own leap into the water is not completed. Still, Viola regards this process as a “baptism” in its original sense of a process of catharsis or clearing away. For him, “water is such a powerful, obvious symbol of cleansing, and also of birth, rebirth, and even death.”

The work on which the poster motif of the exhibition at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg is based is also part of the artist’s decades-long exploration of the element of water. Sharon (2013) is one of Viola’s “Water Portraits” which are unsettling—as water is not a natural environment for humans—but yet here are dreamers who seem to be content in this watery world and who mysteriously seem to be able to exist without the aid of breath.

Light and brightness as a symbol of yearning figure in the installation Night Vigil (2004–2005), a diptych on two screens mounted side by side. They show a woman and a man, kept apart by darkness in the deep of night, being drawn to each other and to the source of light that illuminates their longing. The motifs in Night Vigil are drawn from a 2005 production of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde at the Opéra Bastille on which Viola collaborated with the director Peter Sellars, the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and his studio manager and creative partner Kira Perov.

“Viewing a work by Bill Viola means to enter a room, or a space”, Otto Neumaier frames it. “Many of Viola’s works are essentially rooms or spaces, and for their proper appreciation it is important to experience them as rooms or spaces. Based on their proportions and other features, they convey various experiences, although in many cases they share a kind of structural simplicity that lends them an almost mystical quality”. In this sense, the grand retrospective of Viola’s oeuvre at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg is an invitation to the visitors to immerse themselves in this great artist’s enveloping video-spaces and explore the novel and unwonted perspectives they open on the big questions of life.

Curators: Christina Penetsdorfer, Thorsten Sadowsky