Bill Viola's extraordinary new piece, The Passing is arguably the most important video work of the last few years.


Startling, lyrical, profound and powerfully, authentically moving, it is, in many ways, the perfect expression of Viola's artistic vision. Full of spectral visual phenomena and impressions from the edges of consciousness, The Passing inhabits a penumbral world between dream and reality; between waking and sleep.


Throughout the tape Viola's unquiet slumbers are interrupted by surging, primal memories; and then when brought sharply awake, by intimations of mortality. These fleeting thoughts are brought more clearly into focus via the footage of Viola's family and, in turn, connected up to the passage of the generations and the ceaseless cycle of birth and death.


Viola's imagery more than matches his themes: disclosing a haunting black-and-white world of almost hallucinatory velvet beauty. Rarely, if ever, has video been so visionary in its mood, so poetic in its language and so powerful in its emotional impact.

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Bill Viola's extraordinary new piece, The Passing is arguably the most important video work of the last few years.


Startling, lyrical, profound and powerfully, authentically moving, it is, in many ways, the perfect expression of Viola's artistic vision. Full of spectral visual phenomena and impressions from the edges of consciousness, The Passing inhabits a penumbral world between dream and reality; between waking and sleep.


Throughout the tape Viola's unquiet slumbers are interrupted by surging, primal memories; and then when brought sharply awake, by intimations of mortality. These fleeting thoughts are brought more clearly into focus via the footage of Viola's family and, in turn, connected up to the passage of the generations and the ceaseless cycle of birth and death.


Viola's imagery more than matches his themes: disclosing a haunting black-and-white world of almost hallucinatory velvet beauty. Rarely, if ever, has video been so visionary in its mood, so poetic in its language and so powerful in its emotional impact.