Bill Viola Exhibition
Exhibition, identity, printA figure plunges into dark water. Fire consumes itself, endlessly. A drop falls from a copper pipe, and in it, upside down and unfocused, you see your own face. Bill Viola has spent five decades making video art that returns, again and again, to the same inexhaustible questions: consciousness, mortality, the threshold between states of being. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like: The Art of Bill Viola was the Barnes Foundation Museum's first exhibition devoted exclusively to the video art of a single artist — a survey spanning 1976 to 2009, organized by guest curator John G. Hanhardt, bringing together rarely seen large-scale installations alongside smaller screen-based works.
Designing for Viola's work meant designing in sympathy with its essential qualities: stillness, interiority, a deep formal bilateralism. His compositions pull insistently toward center — figures emerge from darkness, bilateral, suspended. One work in particular, Ablutions, directly inspired the bilateral symmetry and strong vertical axis that became the backbone of the exhibition identity, which mirrors this centering throughout. Cirka by Pangram Pangram provides the typographic anchor; the brochure is printed in black ink on uncoated stock, spare and direct. The invitation pushes further: black spot UV on matte-coated black stock, the text only barely surfacing from its ground, the way a figure emerges from Viola's shadows. Wall texts were silk-screened directly to the wall and applied in cut vinyl — quiet and material, nothing competing with the work.
+ Type: Cirka by Pangram Pangram
+ Art Direction: Olivia Verdugo
+ Graphic Design: Olivia Verdugo and Pauline Nyren
+ Curator: John G. Hanhardt
+ Exhibition Design: Dan Kershaw
+ Exhibition Photography: Sean Murray
+ Invitation Photography: Ian Shiver
© 2026 Olivia S Verdugo