Bill Viola - Ocean without a shore

As seen in Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria

The work was inspired by a poem by 20th century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop: Hearing things more than beings, listening to the voice of fire, the voice of water. Hearing in wind the weeping bushes, sighs of our forefathers. The dead are never gone: they are in the shadows. The dead are not in earth: they're in the rustling tree, the groaning wood, water that runs, water that sleeps; they're in the hut, in the crowd, the dead are not dead. The dead are never gone, they're in the breast of a woman, they'ree in the crying of a child, in the flaming torch. The dead are not in the earth: they're in the dying fire, the weeping grasses, whimpering rocks, they're in the forest, they're in the house, the dead are not dead.

Bill Viola’s Ocean without a shore, which takes its title from the Andalucian Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), explores the threshold between life and death, or as the artist has stated, ‘the presence of the dead in our lives’. The installation is emblematic of Viola’s considered attention to human beings undergoing various states of transformation and renewal. In the installation, three video screens become surfaces for the manifestation of images of the dead attempting to re-enter our world. The physical threshold through which the figures pass is not a digital effect, but actually a ‘sheet’ of cascading water.

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/billviola/index.html

Category:

Film & Animation

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