CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA.-Bill Viola: The Passions , a mesmerising exhibition of recent work by the internationally renowned American video and sound installation artist Bill Viola, opened at the National Gallery of Australia. Organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the exhibition has also toured to the National Gallery, London, and Fundaci� ‘la Caixa’, Madrid. The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra is the sole Australian venue for this large-scale exhibition.

Never before publicly displayed in Australia, the 13 works in the exhibition include large projection pieces and smaller LCD and plasma flat panel displays exploring the human condition and its expansive range of emotions.

Bill Viola is one of the most celebrated video artists working today. He has been producing influential art using film and video for 30 years, exploring themes of time, consciousness and self-perception in works that have their roots in eastern and western art, and mystical traditions.

‘I’ve always been interested in what happens when something is transformed, whether it is our inner emotional, psychological state or the changing weather and light patterns in a landscape,’ says Bill Viola. ‘I have always felt that video is the medium that is most suited to capturing change and transformation, both subjectively with oneself or objectively out in the material world. Transformation is the thread that connects all my work.’

The exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia brings together the key works of The Passions, which were inspired by medieval and Renaissance devotional paintings, exploring ways in which the face and body can express an endless range of emotional states. It also presents two new works in the series, including the latest: Emergence 2002. This piece was inspired by a fresco of the Piet� by 15th-century Italian artist Masolino, a work that represents Christ, half-length in the sarcophagus, being supported on either side by his mother and St John. Emergence shows two women seated by a well, from which a pale young man slowly rises to the surface; with increasing effort they lift him from the water and lay him out on the ground. Shot on 35 mm film, transferred to high-definition video and greatly slowed, the image has a dazzling clarity that reinforces the poignancy of the act.

In the second new work, Observance 2002, 18 performers move forward one by one, confront a distressing sight that we cannot see, struggle with emotion and then retreat. Tightly framed and hypnotically paced, Observance is a moving study of individual expressions of mourning and loss within a community.

Other works featured in the exhibition include Silent Mountain 2001, a study of the onset and aftermath of an explosive emotional outburst that is also a moving visual record of the human capacity for pain and renewal, and Six Heads 2000, which examines six different emotional states – joy, sorrow, anger, fear, awe, and sleep or dream – expressed by the same actor on a single screen.

In addition, one of Viola's most ambitious installations to date, Five Angels for the Millennium 2001, fills a large gallery with video projections of a man plunging into water and floating, angel-like, accompanied by a mysterious and expansive sound-scape. This is an all-enveloping environment of sight and sound, the type of installation for which Viola is best known.

‘We are delighted that the Gallery is presenting Five Angels for the Millennium to give Australian audiences the opportunity for immersion in one of Bill Viola’s most acclaimed works,’ said Ron Radford, Director of the National Gallery of Australia. ‘I have had the opportunity to view this work, and it was a truly sublime experience, one of the few works of art I have seen in recent memory that so literally fulfils this description.’

Bill Viola represented the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995, and was invited to be a Scholar-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 1998. He has also created a suite of video pieces for rock group Nine Inch Nails, and recently collaborated with Los Angeles Philharmonic Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and stage director Peter Sellars on a production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, performed in Los Angeles and Paris. Viola lives and works in Long Beach, California with his wife and long time collaborator, Kira Perov, Executive Director of Bill Viola Studio.

The National Gallery of Australia gratefully acknowledges the generous support of major sponsors HINDMARSH, ActewAGL, MARSH and Qantas Freight, along with supporting sponsors, The Sarah and Baillieu Myer Family Foundation.