Yorkshire Sculpture Park Bill viola at yorkshire sculpture park Media release

10 October 2015–10 April 2016 Chapel and Underground Gallery This autumn, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) presents a significant exhibition by pioneering American video and installation artist, Bill Viola. Developed in collaboration with Viola, Kira Perov, Executive Director, Bill Viola Studio and Clare Lilley, Director of Programme, YSP, it is the most extensive exhibition in the UK by the artist for over 10 years. The immersive exhibition in YSP’s Chapel and Underground Gallery features installations from the last 20 years of Viola’s career and premieres a new work, The Trial. Considering universal themes of life, death, love and spirituality, Viola gives tangible visual form to abstract psychological and metaphysical experiences. He explores facets of the human condition and holds a stark and intimate mirror to our strength, fragility, and the impulses and inevitabilities that unite us. The eight works installed in the Underground Gallery continue Viola’s investigations of the unseeable, the unknowable, and the place between birth and death. His new work, The Trial (2015), depicts, in Viola’s words, “five stages of awakening through a series of violent transformations.” A young woman and a young man, both bare-chested and on separate screens, are each doused with a sudden and unexpected succession of different coloured liquids. Their ordeal intensifies then wanes as the cycle progresses and changes, from despair to fear to relief and then purification. The exhibition also features three works from the Transfigurations series, which reflect on the passage of time and the process by which a person’s inner being is transformed. In Three Women (2008), a mother and her two daughters slowly approach an invisible boundary through which they pass and eventually return. Viola combines images recorded in grainy analogue video from an old surveillance camera with those shot in High-Definition video to bring the viewer to the intersection of obscurity and clarity – from death to life – and back again. Two other related works, The Return and The Innocents (both 2007), use the same device of an unseen wall of water to render visible the momentary threshold between life and death. The earliest work in the exhibition, The Veiling (1995), was created for the US Pavilion at the 46th Venice Biennale. Nine large parallel scrims catch the light from video projectors at opposite sides of the room. Images of a man and a woman moving through a series of nocturnal landscapes are projected through the layers of loosely suspended translucent material. Viola notes, “recorded independently, the images of the man and the woman never coexist in the same video frame. It is only the light from their images that intermingles in the fabric of the hanging cloth.” In Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity (2013) an older man and woman explore their own naked bodies with torches; projected onto black granite slabs the works consider inevitable mortality. The Dreamers (2013), on loan from the Francois Pinault Collection, consists of “seven large plasma screens that depict seven individuals submerged underwater at the bottom of a streambed. Their eyes are closed and they appear to be at peace.” Arranged around a darkened room and accompanied by the gentle sounds of water, the viewers feel as if they, too, are submerged. The installation Night Vigil (2005/9) is a rear-projected video diptych on two adjacent screens. Viola writes “in the video sequence a woman and a man, separated by darkness in the middle of the night, are drawn to each other and to the source of light that illuminates their longing. They undertake individual journeys to reach their goal: his, an outward journey of action – the long approach through the dark night into the light of a blazing fire, and hers, an inward journey of contemplation – the methodical lighting of a bank of candles until the darkness of her room is filled with light.” Inside the 18th century Chapel, a short walk across YSP’s historic deer park, Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (both 2005), draw on the ancient story of lovers gripped by a passion that is blind to duty, honour and social obligation and which can only be consummated beyond the grave. Originally created, together with Night Vigil, as part of a four-hour video for theatre director Peter Sellars’ production of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, the two works are shown one after another in a continuous loop, and combine to make a visual and aural experience that extends Viola’s lifelong engagement with mortality and transcendence. Clare Lilley, Director of Programme at YSP says: “Bill Viola at Yorkshire Sculpture Park aims to be especially meaningful to the Sculpture Park’s intergenerational audience, with works selected to relate to the thresholds of life and the questions they raise, across cultures and geographies. The exhibition is a journey through time and landscape, presenting both intimate and dramatic experiences in one of the most powerful and singular exhibitions of Viola’s career.” For four decades, Viola (b. 1951) has created a profound portfolio of emotionally charged works with which audiences connect worldwide through subjects that investigate fundamental human experience. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as an important form of contemporary art, and his installations, total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound, employ state-of-the-art technologies. Especially for this exhibition, the artist has released a rare limited edition lithograph print of one of his drawings, featuring text from the 16th century Sufi romance, Madhumalati. A fully illustrated guide with introduction by Clare Lilley and an exclusive range of merchandise are also available. The exhibition coincides with the launch of the first comprehensively illustrated monograph of Viola by John G. Hanhardt, Consulting Senior Curator for Film and Media Arts at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, edited by Kira Perov, and published by Thames & Hudson. There are related exhibitions at Blain|Southern who present significant rarely-seen works from Viola’s early career at 4 Hanover Square (13.10.15–21.11.15) and The Vinyl Factory space at Brewer Street Car Park (13.10.15–07.11.15). The Vinyl Factory are also pressing Viola’s early sound compositions as a limited vinyl edition of 100.

Notes to Editors Bill viola represented the USA at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 and his work has been the subject of large solo survey exhibitions at institutions including: The Whitney Museum of American Art (travelled to 5 venues) (1997–2000); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006); and Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2008); and Grand Palais, Paris (2014). Among his numerous awards, he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989. He holds honorary doctorates from Syracuse University (1995), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997), and Royal College of Art, London (2004), among others, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000). In 2006 he was awarded Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government, received the Catalonia International Prize in 2009 and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale in 2011.

Kira Perov Executive Director of Bill Viola Studio and Executive Producer of the works, has been Viola’s partner and collaborator for 35 years. She manages and creatively advises on the production of his installations, and photographs the works and the process. She also curates and coordinates exhibitions of his work worldwide and edits his publications.

Clare Lilley, Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park has had lead responsibility for YSP’s exhibitions and projects, the collection and public engagement since 2010. Recent work and published material include Fiona Banner, Ai Weiwei, Amar Kanwar, Yinka Shonibare MBE, James Lee Byars, Shirin Neshat, Jaume Plensa, James Turrell and Winter/Hörbelt. She co-curated William Turnbull at Chatsworth House (2013) and curated Frieze London Sculpture Park (2012–15) and Jaume Plensa at San Giorgio Maggiore for the Venice Biennele (2015). She has nominated and judged awards for RIBA White Rose Awards, the Arts Foundation Sculpture Prize, the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Artists, and the inaugural Nasher Sculpture Prize. She a Trustee of Site Gallery, Sheffield, sits as an independent member on the Advisory Committee for the Government Art Collection, and is an invited member of the Women Leaders in Museums Network and the Perrier Jouët Arts Salon.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is the leading international centre for modern and contemporary sculpture. It is an independent charitable trust and registered museum (number 1067908) situated in the 500-acre, 18th-century Bretton Hall estate in West Yorkshire. Founded in 1977 by Executive Director Peter Murray, YSP was the first sculpture park in the UK, and is the largest of its kind in Europe, providing the only place in the world to see Barbara Hepworth’s The Family of Man in its entirety alongside a significant collection of sculpture, including bronzes by Henry Moore, and site-specific works by Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash and James Turrell. YSP also mounts a world-class, year-round temporary exhibitions programme including some of the world’s leading artists across five indoor galleries and the open air. Recent highlights include exhibitions by Fiona Banner, Ai Weiwei, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Amar Kanwar, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Joan Miró and Jaume Plensa. 100 works on display across the estate include major sculptures by Roger Hiorns, Sol LeWitt, Dennis Oppenheim, Martin Creed, Anthony Caro and Magdalena Abakanowicz. YSP was named Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2014. YSP’s core work is made possible by investment from Arts Council England, Wakefield Council, Liz and Terry Bramall Foundation and Sakurako and William Fisher through the Sakana Foundation. press enquiries: Abigail Varian, Sutton PR: +44 (0)20 7183 3577 / [email protected] Nina Rogers, Yorkshire Sculpture Park: +44 (0)1924 832 633 [email protected] Orla Houston-Jibo, Thames & Hudson: +44 (0)20 7845 5143 [email protected] Download images at ysp.co.uk/violapress / Follow @YSPsculpture and #violaysp

Images, left to right: Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall), 2005. Colour High-Definition video projection; four channels of sound with subwoofer (4.1). Screen size: 19 ft x 10 ft 8 in (5.8 x 3.26 m); room dimensions variable. 10.16 minutes Performer John Hay; Three Women, 2008. Colour High-Definition video on plasma display mounted on wall 61 1/4 x 36 3/8 x 5 in (155.5 x 92.5 x 12.7 cm) 9.06 minutes. Performers Anika, Cornelia, Helena Ballent. Fire Woman, 2005. Colour High-Definition video projection; four channels of sound with subwoofer (4.1). Screen size: 19 ft x 10 ft 8 in (5.8 x 3.26 m); room dimensions variable. 11.12 minutes. Performer Robin Bonaccorsi. All photos © Kira Perov, courtesy Bill Viola Studio.