Bill Viola is a special exhibition presenting the permanent collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. The exhibition introduces the Tristan Project by the pioneering video artist Bill Viola. He created the work on a new production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, a collaboration with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and opera director Peter Sellars. Viola has received critical accolades for the Tristan Project which ingeniously encompasses music, theatre and video art in the form of Gesamtkunst (total art). The opera production was first performed in Los Angeles in 2004 and has continued to tour worldwide in France, U.K., Germany, Canada, Russia, Japan, etc.
This exhibition features two works from the Tristan Project, Tristan's Ascension(2005) and Fire Woman(2005). Tristan's Ascension describes the ascent of the soul after death in slow motion. A man's limp body rises upward with a torrent of water which brings his soul to heavenly light. In Fire Woman, when a female figure standing before a wall of flame falls and disappears, the boundary between fire and water breaks and melts away in the unity of the opposites. Rather than presenting a narrative interpretation of the story, Viola's abstract images evoke the inner emotions of the characters. In order to realise their fatal love, Tristan and Isolde must transcend life and die. This tragic love story of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde has been beautifully reinterpreted in Viola's works inspired by the elements, particularly water and fire.
These two works epitomize the art of Bill Viola that is recorded in high-speed film and unfolds in extreme slow motion to manipulate temporality and linearity. In many of his works, time goes backward and runs slower. Reversing time, Viola warps our perception of time and breaks the stream of consciousness. He makes the invisible visible by visualizing time with the use of slow motion so that the viewers pay attention to the invisible. Through the poetic images of death and resurrection, Bill Viola poses the philosophical questions of "where do we come from" and "where are we going to".
Bill Viola
Bill Viola(1951~ ) is internationally recognised as one of the world's leading contemporary artists. For over forty years he has been at the forefront of developing the medium of video art. His art largely focuses on the central theme of universal human experiences of life and death. Throughout his career Viola has been drawn to the Eastern spiritual traditions such as Zen Buddhism and Islamic Sufism, as well as Western Christianity. During the 1970s, Viola worked as technical director at a video art studio in Italy where he met a number of video artists such as Paik Nam June, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci. His life-long interests in music grew more deeply while he performed with composer David Tudor who played piano for John Cage's music.
Bill Viola represented the U.S.A. at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 and has exhibited at major museums worldwide including Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Mori Art Museum, etc. In 2008, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea held the exhibition of Bill Viola, showing Ocean Without a Shore, which he produced for the 52th Venice Biennale, Italy.
Bill Viola, Tristan's Ascension, 2005, video & sound installation, size variable, duration 10min 16sec
Bill Viola, Fire Woman, 2005, video & sound installation, size variable, duration 11min 13sec
