23 June 2006
Friday 23 June 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Artist Bill Viola talks to Gabriel Gbadamosi and about his new work. Plus, the last in a series of letters inviting architects and writers to imagine the city of 2056.
Firewoman
by Bill Viola
Playlist
Bill Viola
Bill Viola is one of the most exciting names in the visual art world today - a technological pioneer but also a man with a love and respect for tradition especially the painters of the Renaissance. This week a major new show of his work opens in London. Most of the images on display are inspired by Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, and he uses the myth to explore the themes which have come to preoccupy him more and more in his recent work, passion, loss and redemption. In Night Waves this evening Gabriel Gbadamosi talks to him about his search for meaning beneath the world’s shimmering surface and the struggle to communicate what he finds there.
Bill Viola's Love/Death: The Tristan Project is being shown by the Haunch of Venison gallery. There are two installations - one at the gallery itself which is in Haunch of Venison Yard off Brook Street in London and the other is at St.Olave's College in Tooley Sreet near Tower Bridge. The displays run until 2 September.
William St Clair
Later this month William St Clair publishes a book on Cape Coast Castle – the fort on Africa’s Gold Coast which for more than a hundred years was the grand emporium of the British Slave Trade. Gabriel will be asking him how this extraordinary institution came into being and exploring with his fellow historian, James Walvin, the place it now has in the problematic legacy of slavery.
The Grand Slave Emporium by William St Clair is published by Profile Books on 29 June.
Princess Raccoon
There’ll also be a review of Princess Raccoon an extraordinary film operetta made by one of Japan’s great lost directors, Seijun Suzuki so join Gabriel this evening here on BBC Radio 3 at the usual time of nine thirty.
Princess Raccoon directed by Seijun Suzuki will be shown at selected cinemas from next 30 June.
