ALMATY – The Almaty Museum of Arts has opened “Bill Viola: The Space of Time,” the first major exhibition in Central Asia dedicated to the late American artist Bill Viola, one of the world’s most influential pioneers of video art. Running from July 1 to Jan. 17, 2027, the exhibition presents the region’s first large-scale museum project devoted entirely to video art.
Organized in collaboration with Bill Viola Studio in California and curated by Kira Perov – the studio’s director, Viola’s wife and longtime creative collaborator – the exhibition is presented with strategic support from Halyk Bank. Bringing a world-renowned artist to Central Asia Bill Viola.
Photo credit: billviola.com. Featuring 18 works created between 1977 and 2013, the exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Viola’s artistic evolution from his pioneering experiments with analog video and cathode-ray television installations to monumental multi-channel projections and immersive environments.
Occupying the museum’s Uly Dala Hall, Art Street, and one of the Artists’ Halls, the exhibition transforms the spaces into environments where moving images become vehicles for reflection, memory, and emotional experience. “Opening Viola’s exhibition is a historic event not only for Almaty Museum of Arts but for all of Central Asia.
We created this museum as a platform connecting Kazakhstan with the global art world and bringing internationally recognized masterpieces to our audiences,” said Nurlan Smagulov, founder of the museum, during the exposition opening ceremony on June 29. For more than four decades, Viola expanded the boundaries of video as an artistic medium.
Drawing inspiration from Zen Buddhism, Sufism and other contemplative traditions, he explored fundamental questions of life and death, consciousness, memory and spiritual transformation. In Four Hands (2001) the artist presents the hands of three generations performing a choreographed sequence of symbolic gestures.
Photo credit: The Astana Times. Recurring elements such as water, fire, light and darkness serve both as physical forces and symbolic bridges between the visible and invisible worlds. Time itself lies at the center of Viola’s work. Through extreme slow motion and choreographed imagery, he stretched fleeting moments into profound emotional experiences, encouraging viewers to contemplate states of being that often escape everyday perception.
Fire Woman (2005) starts with the female figure emerging from darkness before falling into her own reflection. Photo credit: The Astana Times.