Almaty, June 29, 2026 – From 1 July 2026, the Almaty Museum of Arts will present Bill Viola: The Space of Time, the first large-scale exhibition in Central Asia dedicated to the video artist Bill Viola. The exhibition brings together 18 seminal works spanning more than three decades of the artist’s career, offering a rare insight into the practice of one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. The project is realised with the strategic support of Halyk Bank.

Organised in collaboration with the Bill Viola Studio (Long Beach, CA), the exhibition is curated by Kira Perov - Viola’s wife, closest collaborator and Director of the Bill Viola Studio.

“The opening of Bill Viola: The Space of Time marks a significant moment not only for the Almaty Museum of Arts, but for Central Asia as a whole’, says Nurlan Smagulov, founder of the Almaty Museum of Arts. “From the outset, we envisioned the museum as a place where audiences in Kazakhstan could engage with the most important artistic voices of our time. Bill Viola redefined the language of video art and left a lasting mark on contemporary art. His works speak to fundamental aspects of the human experience and continue to resonate across cultures and generations. It is a great privilege to present the first exhibition of his work in Central Asia and to share this extraordinary body of work with audiences in the region”.

Umut Shayakhmetova, CEO of Halyk Bank, noted: “We live in a world where competition between countries is not only for investments, technology, and talent, but also for the quality of the cultural environment. It is culture that shapes an open mindset, creativity, and society's ability to create something new. At Halyk, we consistently support initiatives that enrich the cultural life of the country and create opportunities to discover prominent global names. The Bill Viola exhibition is truly a world-class event that offers a fresh perspective on art, humanity, and time. We are glad that we can contribute to the development of Kazakhstan's cultural space and make such projects accessible to a wide audience”.

The Space of Time brings together works created between 1977 and 2013, marking Central Asia’s first major exhibition dedicated entirely to video art. Spanning the Uly Dala Hall, Art Street and one of the museum’s Artist Rooms, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to follow the development of Bill Viola’s practice – from his earliest experiments with the moving image to large-scale immersive installations.

The exhibition opens with two monumental video installations, Fire Woman (2005) and Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (2005). Originally created for director Peter Sellars’ production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the works accompanied the opera’s final act, in which the protagonists’ tragic love story reaches its culmination.

In Fire Woman, a solitary female figure emerges from darkness and slowly approaches the viewer. As she raises her arms, she falls into her own reflection, which dissolves her image into a shimmering expanse of light and water. The work evokes the threshold between presence and absence, the visible and the unseen.

In Tristan’s Ascension, the artist offers a poetic meditation on the journey of the soul leaving the earthly world after death. A man’s body, resting on a stone slab, is gradually enveloped by a torrential stream of water that, defying the laws of nature, rushes upward. The mounting sound builds into a powerful roar as the body rises into a space of light, creating one of the most stunning and emotionally charged images in Bill Viola’s oeuvre.

Among the earliest works in the exhibition is The Reflecting Pool (1977–1979/1997), widely regarded as a landmark in the history of video art. At its centre is a man suspended in mid-air above a pool while the surrounding landscape continues to change. Water – one of the defining motifs throughout Viola’s practice – appears here as a metaphor for memory and a threshold between different states of being. Water, one of the central motifs in Viola’s art, serves here as a metaphor for memory and the threshold between the visible and invisible worlds. The work is also deeply rooted in the artist’s personal experience: having nearly drowned as a child, this pivotal event profoundly influenced both his life and his creative vision.

In Heaven and Earth (1992), Bill Viola addresses the themes of birth, death and the continuity of life. The piece consists of two monitors facing each other closely. One captures the artist’s mother in the final days of her life, while the other shows his newborn son. Separated only by a narrow gap and reflecting into one another, these images connect the beginning and the end of the human journey, revealing life and death as parts of a single, continuous cycle.

Also featured is The Raft (2004), one of Viola’s most celebrated works. A diverse group of people stands together before being struck by a sudden torrent of water. Filmed in extreme slow motion, the scene unfolds as a meditation on vulnerability, resilience, compassion and the bonds that emerge in moments of crisis.

Among the exhibition’s key works is Stations (1994) from the permanent collection of the Almaty Museum of Arts, presented in one of the museum’s dedicated Artist Rooms. Widely regarded as a pivotal work in Bill Viola’s oeuvre, it brings together many of the ideas that would become characteristic of his practice. Water appears as a metaphor for purification and rebirth, while the moving image expands beyond the screen to become part of a total spatial experience shaped by scale, volume, light, sound and the viewer’s physical presence.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue published in Kazakh, Russian and English. The publication includes a newly commissioned essay by curator and writer Valentino Catricalà examining the influence of Eastern philosophy on Viola’s work, a 2001 conversation between the artist and curator of new media John G. Hanhardt, and the artist’s own descriptions of the exhibited works.

‘Throughout his creative life, Bill explored all forms and techniques using video. He began with experiments with videotape, examining what is possible with this new tool that became available to artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The early works were self-reflective, turning the camera on himself, looking for ways to express his ongoing enquiries about our physical existence. The camera was an extension of himself, an eye that did not close, a living tool. The works in this exhibition show us that the moving image is very powerful, no matter what technology is used’, says Kira Perov, Director of the Bill Viola Studio.

“Presenting Bill Viola’s work in Almaty reflects the Almaty Museum of Arts’ mission to connect Kazakhstan and Central Asia with the most important developments in global art. This exhibition offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter one of the defining artists of our time through a major museum-scale presentation”, - says Meruyert Kaliyeva, Artistic Director of the Almaty Museum of Arts. “We believe that engaging with such artists helps us look at art and ourselves in a completely new way”.

Dates: July 1, 2026 – January 17, 2027

Venue: Almaty Museum of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan (Uly Dala Hall)

Curator: Kira Perov

Strategic Partner: Halyk Bank

Admission: Included with standard museum admission.