September of this year, the Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul was very lively, not only welcoming the 16th Istanbul Biennial, but also prepare the exhibition "Impermanence" by Bill Viola, the father of video. Bill Viola uses excellence in video technology. In the era of traditional TV production and video technology just start, he began to explore the new media of video and use it as the main medium of artistic creation to lead the art world to open up new fields, that is why he is known as the pioneer of video art. He has created many classic works in his artistic life, such as videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, received numerous awards, including Polaroid Video Art Award for outstanding achievement( 1984 ), Maya Deren Award, American Film Institute( 1987 ), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1989), Skowhegan Medal (Video Installation)( 1993 ), Cultural Leadership Award, American Federal of Arts( 2003 ), NORD/LB Art Prize( 2006 ), Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts, MIT( 2009 ), XXI Catalonia International Prize (2009), Arents Award for Distinguished Alumni, Syracuse University( 2011 ), the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2011).
Born in New York in 1951, Bill Viola grew up in Queens and Westbury. When he was 6 years old, he once traveled with his family and almost drowning in the lake. He thought this experience was "the most beautiful world in life. No fear, only calm." He studied at Syracuse University, and someone donated a Sony Portapak camera to the school, giving him the opportunity to get to know video technology in advance. He studied visual art with Jack Nelson, studied electronic music with Franklin Morris, and as an assistant worked with Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, Frank Gillette. Bill Viola got a bachelor's degree in 1973, then worked as an audiovisual technician at the Everson Museum of Art, learning with David Tudor, and cooperation with John Cage.
Between 1974 and 1976, Bill Viola lived in Florence for 18 months and served as technical director of production at Art/Tapes/22, which was Europe's first video art studio. From 1976 to 1980, New York TV station WNET-Channel 13 program "Television Laboratory" invited Bill Viola to be a resident artist, during which he created many works. In 1977, La Trobe University cultural arts director Kira Perov invited Bill Viola to present his video work. A year later, she married Bill Viola and moved to New York together. In 1980, Bill Viola was awarded U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, lived with his wife in Japan for a year and a half, as a guest artist in Sony's research laboratories, and studied Zen Buddhism with Master Daien Tanaka.
The influence of drowning experience was also reflected in the opera "Tristan und Isolde" that he collaborated with director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2004. They created a new version of Tristan und Isolde, which was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December of the same year, and the complete opera debut was performed at the Opéra National de Paris Bastille in April 2005.
Bill Viola's creative concept revolves about human birth, death, emotional expression, consciousness awakening, etc., and blend into many elements like natural elements air, water, fire, earth, or religious elements include Christian mysticism, Buddhist Zen, Islamic Sufism, and so on. Bill Viola's The video-shooting techniques are high-speed photography, and then use the system adjusts the frame rate to make the video show a very slow movement. In the distorted time stream movie, you can observe the moments of all the detail changes and feel the moment of all emotion conversion.
The works of Bill Viola are collected in major galleries around the world, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Arken, Museum für Moderne Kunst, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Art Institute of Chicago, Berardo Collection, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Centre Georges Pompidou, Dallas Museum of Art, De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, Faurschou Foundation, Fondation Cartier, Fondation François Pinault, Fundacío la Caixa Centre Cultural, Kunsthalle Bremen, Kunstmuseum Basel, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Ludwig Stiftung, Cologne, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Musée d”Art Contemporain de Lyon, Musée d”Art Contemporain, Montreal, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, National Museum of Art, Tokyo, National Museum of Contemporary Art EMST, , Athens, Greece, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Tate Modern, London, The Chaplaincy to the Arts and Recreation in North East England, Durham, The Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, Basel, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, The Sorigue Foundation, Lleida, Spains, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Bill Viola's famous works, including the 1992 Nantes Triptych, continue the form of classical triptych, conveying the birth, life, death, recording the birth of his son, a man sinking under the water and the death of his mother. "The Veiling" (1995), a lot of flat veils hung in the center of the exhibition hall. The projectors project a men and a woman from the walls on both sides and two people will meet at the center of the veil. The concept of "The Greeting" (1995) was derived from "The Visitation" by Jacopo Da Pontormo of the Renaissance. There are also "The Quintet Series" (2000), "Observance" (2002), "The Raft" (2004), "The Night Journey" (2005), and 2007 invited to the Venice Biennale "Ocean without a shore" and "The Martyrs Earth, Air, Fire, Water" (2014) and other works.
The "Impermanence" exhibition was curated by Kathleen Forde, with three themes of immersion, transformation, a confrontation with basic elements of air, and water, run throughout all ten works. The works "Ascension" and "The Raft" both convey the struggle and confrontation of human power in water; the work "Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat)" conveys the light and heat that is expressed in the air with the mirage and snow-covered mountains of the Sahara Desert.
Bill Viola ”Impermanence”
Date: 14 September 2019 – 13 September 2020
Venue: Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey
Figure 1：Bill Viola, Nantes Triptych, 1992, Three-channel colour video triptych, free text 3.2 x 2.3m, 3.2 x 4m, 3.2 x 2.3m, duration 00:29:46. © Royal Academy of Arts
Figure 2 top left：Bill Viola, Fire Woman, 2005 © Royal Academy of Arts
Figure 2 left bottom：Bill Viola, Photo: Jonty Wilde © 2019 – Opéra national de Paris
Figure 2 top right： BILL VIOLA, Tempest (Study for The Raft), 2005, Color video on LCD flat panel mounted on wall, 26 X 43 1/2 X 5 in. Edition of 5 ©James Cohan
Figure 2 right middle：Bill Viola, Tristan und Isolde © Blain |Southern 2017
Figure 2 right bottom：Bill Viola, Departing Ange, panel 1 from Five Angels for the Millennium, 2001, Video/sound installation, Performer: Josh Coxx, Courtesy Bill Viola Studio © Royal Academy of Arts.
