BILL VIOLA
One of the world’s most well-known video artists, Bill Viola was born in 1951 in the United States. Since the 1970s, when video technology became available to a larger public, he dedicated his work to this medium. He contributed immensely to the establishment ol video as an accepted medium of artistic expression. The themes of his early works centre on fundamental human experiences like birth and death. In the beginning of the 1990s he developed a motif which has since dominated his work: his large-scale video installa¬tions show people under water, resting, floating or fighting against the floods in extremely decelerated slow motion. This theme goes back to a crucial event in Viola’s own life when he almost drowned as a child, an experience he in hindsight describes as positive and peaceful. In “Three Women”, like in other works, water is a multi-layered symbolic catalyst for liberation and a broadening of the mind. Bill Viola is based in Long Beach, USA.