Online Art Talk

Online Art Talk: Curator Barbara London on Bill Viola’s early work

Welcome to an online talk by curator and writer Barbara London, hosted in conjunction with the ongoing exhibition Bill Viola – Into the Light at Stavanger Art Museum (until August 15).

Barbara London will investigate the early practice of Bill Viola. Her talk will begin with the artist’s early single-channel videotapes, which he described as “songs” and” “visual poems,” assembled in much the way a musician arranges a record album. Viola himself was the performer, and the early videotapes revolved him as the initiator of feelings and ideas. London will look into how Viola would develop each of his themes both as a single-channel video and as an installation, one linear with a narrative flow and the other spatial with an immersive dimension.

Barbara London is a New York-based curator and writer, who founded the video-media exhibition and collection programs at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked between 1973 and 2013. Her current projects include the podcast series Barbara London Calling (barbaralondon.net), the book Video Art/The First Fifty Years (Phaidon: 2020), and the exhibition “Seeing Sound” (Independent Curators International), 2021-2024.

London’s writing has appeared in numerous catalogs and publications, including The Guardian, ArtForum, Flash Art, Yishu, Leonardo, Art Asia Pacific, Art in America, and Modern Painter. London organized one-person shows with such media mavericks as Laurie Anderson, Teiji Furuhashi, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, Song Dong, Bill Viola, and Zhang Peili. Her thematic exhibitions at MoMA included Soundings: A Contemporary Score (2013); Looking at Music (2009); Video Spaces (1995); Music Video: The Industry and Its Fringes (1985); and Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto (1979). She was the first to integrate the Internet as part of curatorial practice, with Stir-fry (1997) http://www.adaweb.com/context/stir-fry/.

The talk will be held in English.