Bill Viola’s Journey of Emotions

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Rachel Donadio

A detail from ‘‘Going Forth By Day’’ (2002) by Bill Viola. Credit Collection Pinault/Kira Perov

FRANCE---The largest retrospective ever of the American video artist Bill Viola opened at the Grand Palais here last week. With 20 high-tech works that draw on age-old themes, the exhibition, which runs through July 21, showcases the artist’s work over the past 40 years in a series of large, darkened rooms that take on the hushed quality of a chapel. Mr. Viola’s most recent creation, with seven high-resolution screens each showing a person under water, it is not organized chronologically. Instead, Mr. Viola, his wife and collaborator, Kira Perov, and the exhibition organizer Jérôme Neutres, arranged the exhibition around three metaphysical questions: Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? [link]