Bill Viola's Video Explorations of Life & Death, As Retrospective

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Survivors in “The Raft,” Bill Viola’s 2004 video of natural disasters and acts of war.

FLORIDA---“The Raft” is one of 11 large-scale video installations in “Bill Viola: Liber Insularum” (“The Book of Islands”) going on view Dec. 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami as the art world descends on Miami Beach for Art Basel, which opens the next day. “The world is fine and everything is normal and then, bang, you just get bowled over by the wrathful deities somehow,” said Mr. Viola, 61, who is based in Long Beach, Calif., and has been widely recognized as a pioneer in the medium of video art since the 1970s. An altar boy as a youth, Mr. Viola, while never particularly religious, was attracted to the rituals and imagery of the church. The stakes changed for Mr. Viola, though, after the loss of his mother in 1991, the same year his second son was born. [link]