Mounted in cooperation with Guggenheim Museum, the exhibition BILL VIOLA Visions comprises a selection of the American artist Bill Viola’s highly original video installations. Since the 1970s, Viola has figured prominently on the international art scene. Using cutting edge technology, he has helped redefine the scope of video art’s aesthetic potential.

In his complex aural and visual installation works, Viola interrogates primordial themes such as birth, life, death and rebirth: existential motifs universal in scope and significance. By way of a vividly visual idiom, he challenges our senses – our sight and hearing – while also spurring active reflection.

This exhibition represents the first opportunity for the Danish public to view a major show of Bill Viola’s works: works that appeal both to the intellect and the emotions, conjuring visions that relate to the key fundamentals of human existence and their transcendent dimension.

The exhibition features five of Viola’s video installation pieces:

The Messenger, 1996
This work exemplifies Viola’s fascination with life’s mystery and magic. The installation thematizes the motif of the human form submerged in water. According to the artist, his interest in this motif was sparked by a boyhood incident in which he nearly drowned. Viola recalls the episode as a peace-filled, poetic experience which was later to suggest itself as a metaphor for human existence. As the work title suggests, the figure is a messenger who assumes the role of a conduit between the realm of concrete reality and a reality beyond.

The Crossing, 1996
The Crossing consists of two video projections on a double-sided screen. The simple narrative sequence shows a man advancing towards the viewer. Once in the foreground of the image, he stops. On the one projection, droplets of water silently to trickle down upon the man’s head while on the other a small flame begins to flare up around his feet. The flames and the water droplets gradually intensify and end by subsuming him completely. Both elements harbour a life-giving and a destructive side – natural forces that have the power both to consume and create life.

Surrender, 2001
The single-screen work Surrender revolves around sorrow and pain, and not least the human subject’s surrender to extremes of emotion. The work is a part of the video series ‘The Passions’ in which Viola explores the depths and intensities spanned by the human emotional register. Surrender, a work made up of two plasma screens, depicts a man and woman whose faces are distorted with pain. The figures are reflected in the surface of a pool of water into which – in extreme slow motion – they plunge, the water running off their faces like tears. Their emotional expressions gain in intensity and the figures dissolve.

Five Angels for the Millennium, 2001
ARoS’s own installation Five Angels for the Millennium consists of five projections. The images depict five angels ascending and descending, respectively, from a smouldering, tenebrous sea. As with other of his works, Viola takes his cue from religious iconography in which angels represent a connecting link between, on the one hand, physical concrete reality, and on the other, the spiritual, metaphysical realm.

Going Forth By Day, 2002
One of the most striking installations in the exhibition is the monumental work Going Forth By Day, a commission created by Bill Viola for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2002. Five large images are projected directly onto the walls of a large room, as in frescoes. With depictions of the various stages of life – from birth to death and resurrection – the work represents an epic portrayal of the human life cycle with each scene offering an interpretation of the basic parameters framing human existence.

All five works are distinguished by their physical monumentality and Viola’s effective annexation of the space surrounding the video pieces. The scale of the images and the spatial environment are thus intrinsic to the experience of Viola’s art. Our senses are challenged as we pass through the crepuscular installation spaces which come across as vivid three-dimensional painterly tableaux. The mesmerizing sound effects and large-scale projected images impact on both hearing and sight, while also engaging the intellect. These existential interpretations thus activate not only the mind but also the entire bodily sensorium, delivering a visceral impact.

Bill Viola produces visions, through the medium of visually potent images that that bring our concrete physical reality into an interplay with an underlying, metaphysical realm. These vivid images come across as visions or revelations that thrust up to the surface and break through it to be articulated as colour, sound and human figures. Visions of our existence and its transcendent dimension. Of the elemental conditions of living and dying – and the intervening time between the two.