The first work of video art to enter the collection of the Department of Modern Art and the first major video installation to be acquired by the Museum is by the preeminent video artist Bill Viola, who has been working primarily in this medium since the early 1970s. Inspired by the artist's study of late medieval and early Renaissance paintings and their iconography, specifically the depiction of the Passion in Italian and Flemish painting of the era, the work belongs to a series of four, created in 2000 and 2001, in each of which a grouping of five people undergoes a mounting wave of emotional intensity.

Here, three women and two men, seen in close-up against a neutral backdrop, independently express the emotions of compassion, shock, grief, anger, and fear—sometimes even rapture—in extreme slow motion, without sound, using only expressions and gestures. Their sixty-second performance was filmed with high-speed 35mm film, then transferred to video and extended to sixteen minutes and nineteen seconds of slow-motion projection. The slow motion accentuates the power and depth of each emotion expressed. Running continuously on a loop, this powerful work makes provocative connections between the art of early Renaissance Europe and that of twenty-first-century America.