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BILL VIOLA
GOING FORTH BY DAY
February 09 to May 05, 2002
From February 9 until May 5, 2002, the Deutsche Guggenheim is presenting Bill Viola: Going Forth By Day, a newly commissioned installation transforming the Deutsche Guggenheim gallery space on Unter den Linden. Bill Viola, one of the leading contemporary artists, has been a pioneer in the use of video and exploration of the moving image, creating single channel works, installations, and a range of works that reflect his deep engagement with art history, spirituality, and conceptual as well as perceptual issues.
In his new commission created especially for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Viola references fresco painting to create a powerful five-projection-based installation that examines cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. Each "panel" - a projection seen directly on the walls of the space - is 35 minutes in length and was recorded in state-of-the-art digital High-Definition video. Together, the five panels, "Fire Birth," "The Path," "The Deluge," "The Voyage," and "First Light," create an unparalleled visual and aural experience and reflect powerful spiritual and mythological concepts of renewal. Entering the Deutsche Guggenheim gallery, the viewer will first come upon a darkened space devoid of art, with a wall and doorway that lead into the partitioned main space. In this gallery space, five projected image panels convey the fresco cycle, a suite of works that serves to create an epic articulation of the passage of nature's cycles and offers mythic reflections on the temporal flow of birth and regeneration.
As the viewer passes through the entryway, he/she will at the same time be walking through "Fire Birth," a large image of a body submerged in flaming red water, an allusion to the world ending in fire and beginning in water. On the left wall of the gallery, the panel "The Path" is projected, a long, panoramic moving image of individuals walking through a wooded environment; a flow of humanity engaged in a never ending journey. The facing wall features the panel "The Deluge," which depicts the façade of a building with people fleeing a deluge of water that bursts out of the building. On the right gallery wall is the panel "The Voyage," which suggests a narrative of passage, as a dying old man in a house overlooking a large body of water, has a boat prepared to depart for the far shore. The final panel, "First Light" shows a landscape at dawn with a group of rescue workers exhausted, who worked to save lives after a catastrophe, who finally succumb to sleep, a man silently rises out from the water into the heavens.
Viola's new installation is a highly complex project which involved the use of a variety of locations for recording, an extremely high level of cinematic production values, and the technical expertise needed to create the individual panels with sophisticated digital processing and post-production editing. The resulting installation reflects Viola's creation of a fully realized image world, an associative narrative conveyed through the panels, each functioning as a narrative element within an epic whole.
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Bill Viola studied at Syracuse University in New York state in the early 1970s, where his exploration with electronic arts led him to produce works of sound art as well as video installation. His early contact with Nam June Paik, David Tudor, and other influential sound and video artists encouraged him to continue working with video, and he went on to create numerous single channel works and installations both in the US and abroad. He has been featured in single-artist and group exhibitions internationally, represented the U.S. in the 1995 Venice Biennale, and from 1997-2000 was the subject of a major touring retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Bill Viola: Going Forth By Day continues the series of exhibitions commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim. This exhibition follows Rachel Whiteread's hauntingly beautiful sculptural installations and Hiroshi Sugimoto's masterful series of waxwork photographs.
Organizers of the exhibition are John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, with Maria-Christina Villaseñor, Associate Curator of Film and Media Arts, both at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. A special artist's book will be produced for the opening of the exhibition with excerpts from Viola's notebook detailing the artist's conceptual process and the development of the Deutsche Guggenheim commission Going Forth By Day at a price of € 25. This publication will be followed by a full-color catalogue that includes extensive illustrations of the five panels that make up Going Forth By Day at a price of € 33. Both catalogues, designed by Rebeca Méndez, will be produced in bilingual German/English editions and will feature an extended conversation between Bill Viola and exhibition curator John G. Hanhardt that explores the artist's influences, thematics, and working methods.
In an Artist's Talk on Sunday, February 10, 5 p.m. at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Bill Viola will discuss his latest work "Going Forth By Day" with John G. Hanhardt.
Like Bill Viola, the choreographer and dancer Cesc Gelabert deals with a cyclic journey through time in his new solo project "Preludis." The performance may be seen at the Hebbel-Theater, Berlin from February 13 to 15, at 8 p.m. At Deutsche Guggenheim the Barcelona-based artist Gelabert speaks with Johannes Odenthal, director of music theater dance at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt about his new project. The discussion is a collaboration with the Hebbel-Theater, Berlin.
Deutsche Guggenheim invites both adults and children to visit the Familiy Brunch on Sunday, March 3, 2002, at 11.30 a.m. On Wednesday, March 13, 2002, at 7 p.m., Rolf Lauter will present the lecture Bill Viola: About the Myth of Being. Visual Worlds Between Timeless Space and Spaceless Time. He is curator at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt and co-ordinated in 1999 the presentation of the Bill Viola Retrospective by New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in Frankfurt am Main.
Press Preview: Friday, February 8, 2002, 11 a.m.
Images of the exhibition
are available online at www.photo-files.de/guggenheim in a 300 dpi quality.
Further information at
Manager: Svenja Gräfin von Reichenbach
Press: Sara Bernshausen
Phone: +49-30-202093-14
Fax: +49-30-202093-20
email: berlin.guggenheim@db.com
Internet: www.deutsche-guggenheim.de
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