Wafaa Bilal
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Wafaa Bilal (born 1966) is an Iraqi American artist and Assistant Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is best known for his performance piece entitled Domestic Tension, where he lived in a gallery for a month and was shot by paintballs interactively by internet users watching from a webcam.
According to Bilal:
Iraqi born artist Wafaa Bilal has exhibited his art world wide, and traveled and lectured extensively to inform audiences of the situation of the Iraqi people, and the importance of peaceful conflict resolution. Bilal's 2007 dynamic installation Domestic Tension placed him on the receiving end of a paintball gun that was accessible online to a worldwide audience, 24 hours a day. Newsweek called the project “breathtaking” and the Chicago Tribune called the month-long piece "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time," and named Bilal its 2007 Artist of the Year. Bilal has exhibited worldwide including in Baghdad, the Netherlands, Thailand and Croatia; as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum and various other US galleries.
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Projects
Domestic Tension
Wafaa Bilal's (2007) Domestic Tension was an installation and performance at Flatfile Gallery in Chicago, IL. Over the course of 30 days in May, 2007, Bilal lived inside a room in the back of the gallery. The defining feature of Bilal’s sparsely furnished room was an ominous paint gun, which was connected to the Internet via direct feed. Anyone who visited the exhibit’s website could take control of the gun and fire at will. The piece can be described as an artistic rumination on the interconnections between technology, killing, entertainment, morality, and the global war on terror.
Motivated by a television report about a soldier remotely firing missiles in Iraq while sitting comfortably in Colorado, Bilal devised this piece as a response to the abstractness of contemporary war and its consequences—consequences that are intensely personal to him, having lost both his father and brother in Iraq as a result of the ongoing U.S. military campaign. By the end of the installation, more than 60,000 people from 130 countries shot at him.
See also:
- FLATFILE GALLERY: Media Alert about the "Virtual Human Sheild"
- City Lights: Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun (Book)
- YouTube: The paintball project
