Bill Viola, 2008

Wednesday 9 April - Saturday 17 May 2008, 6.30pm - 10.30pm daily. Two video art works from the Tristan Project were displayed on a 6m high screen on the altar wall of this romanesque revival church from 1853. A Kaldor Public Art Project in partnership with St Saviour's Church, Redfern. Presented in conjunction with the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Supported by Haunch of Venison.

Over the past 40 years Kaldor Public Art Projects have brought us a series of memorable art-events - always as a gift from the artists, and from John, to anyone here who was open to receive them. I say here because the the fact that these events take place in a local habitation, here in Sydney or in Melbourne, is essential to John's idea of how art functions: in each case, he and his artist very carefully choose an unexpected site. Partly so that the work will appear at its most powerful, but also that it will work to change the nature and history of the site.; to mark it with the presence, in memory of the event. Little Bay - our vision of it - has never ben the same since Christo. Neither has Cockatoo Island or the Melbourne Meat Markets or Bondi Beach since their art-events. Site and event re specific to one another. And the same, I think, will be true after tonight and the coming nights at St Saviour's. It might have been sitting here for over a hundred years and more waiting for just this.

Its a beautiful building in itself. Happening on its rich red brick antipodean Byzantine Romanesque in an ordinary row of terraced houses is always a surprise - and that surprise, surely, was prepared for by its being set back and hidden as you approach till you are right in line with it and look up. When I first saw it, the interior was another surprise - impressively ample, but quite unadorned and unencumbered, almost bare - as if it was waiting to be amplified and illuminated as it is tonight, filled with Bill Viola's bodily images, and images of fire and water, of souls in visible action.

So, Thank you Bill and Kira and Kaldor Public Art Projects and its team and supporters: thanks to the men, a century ago who created this building and those over the years who have worshipped and preserved it for us. The motive force of Tristan and Isolde is magic. The lovers think thus magic is in a cup, to be drunk and allowed to change and release them. In fact, that transformative power of magic is inside of them already. It is imagination. It is death. It is love.

Now let Bill Viola's magic - his imagination - your imagination - work in you.

David Malouf