Bill Viola

James Cohan is pleased to present The Raft, an exhibition of video works by the groundbreaking artist Bill Viola, on view at 291 Grand Street from November 9 through December 21, 2024. This is the late artist’s tenth solo exhibition at James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception on Saturday, November 9 from 4-6 PM. Renowned media arts scholar and curator John G. Hanhardt will give remarks at 4 PM, paying tribute to Viola's life and legacy.

Bill Viola (1951-2024) was a pioneer in the fields of new media, video, and installation art. For over 50 years his visionary environments, defined by immersive video and soundscapes, focused on the fundamental human experiences of birth, death, and the unfolding of consciousness. Viola also drew great inspiration from spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. By slowing down his images, Viola shifted viewers’ sense of perception and awareness to reveal the inner world. 

This exhibition is centered upon Viola’s large-scale video installation, The Raft, May 2004, commissioned for the 2004 Athens Olympics, and exhibited for the first time in New York. The Raft depicts a life-sized scale of a group of nineteen men and women from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds, casually standing together. Suddenly, they are struck by strong blasts of water that rush in from out of frame. Some are immediately knocked over and others brace themselves against the unprovoked deluge. Bodies are pummeled and faces and limbs contort in agony against the cold, hard force. People in the group cling to each other for survival, as the simple act of remaining upright becomes an intense physical struggle. 

Then, as suddenly as it arrived, the water stops, leaving behind a band of suffering, bewildered, and battered individuals. The group slowly recovers as some regain their senses, others weep, while the few with any strength assist those who have fallen. The viewer experiences this event in an immersive setting, standing in a darkened room and surrounded by the roaring sounds of the water. Captured in slow-motion, The Raft arouses a visceral experience of calamity and shared humanity, provoking a consideration of the range of responses to crisis and the resilience to be found in community.

The exhibition also features Traveling on Foot, 2012, one of five works from Viola’s Mirage series of desert-based meditations on existence. In this video installation, two figures are captured in slow motion, walking closely together, across a stretch of the Mojave Desert towards the camera, with no end in sight. The desert, for Viola, acts as a mirror of the mind. The vast, harsh, arid landscape has the ability of producing mirages, which Viola terms as early as 1979 as “hallucinations of landscape”—the experience, he notes, “of being in someone else’s dream.” Traveling on Foot investigates the limits of our understanding of the position of the human in the natural order, both physically and metaphysically.

Coming of age alongside the development of video, Viola experimented with the new technologies to explore the furthest reaches of the expressive possibilities of this new medium. He once said, “I gradually realized that the act of perception was in fact a viable form of knowledge in and of itself, and not merely a kind of phenomenon. This meant that when I held the video camera and microphone, I was holding a philosophical system, not just some image and sound gathering tool."