The Passing - Bill Viola (1991)

"The Passing", 1991, opens with an image of the night sky, which changes into a sheet of water in which a draped human figure struggles not to drown. Will he be saved? It seems so: a suicidal leap into water reverses itself, the leaper returning to the sky. But then the artist appears underwater, as though drowned, or, perhaps, as though identifying with his child in the womb–or is it with his mother? The tape is ostensibly about the child's birth and the mother's death, which coincided closely. Yet the the real content and mystery of The Passing are the emergence from water and the sinking beneath it. The family milestones are not of the tape's essence–they simply provide occastions, however complex, for the drowning image, which recurs in virtually all Viola's works.
"The Passing" is a personal response to the spiritual extremes of birth and death in the family. Black-and-white nocturnal imagery and underwater scenes depict a twilight world hovering on the borders of human perception and consciousness, where the multiple lives of the mind-memory, reality, and vision-merge.

Pioneer in the medium of video art, Bill Viola's work explores the spiritual and perceptual side of human experience. Since 1970 he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances and pieces for television.