Dr.Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi born artist, a former professor at the Art Institute of Chicago and currently an art professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
He is known internationally for his on-line performances that explore tensions between where he lives now, in the U.S. and the conflict zones of Iraq.
Wafaa Bilal’s brother Haji was killed by a missile in their hometown, Kufa. Bilal felt that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis like his brother were invisible to Americans, so in a 24-hour live performance Bilal had his back tattooed to bring awareness to their deaths. On a map of Iraq with no borders, a dot was placed for each Iraqi and American war casualty. This meant 5,000 American soldiers represented by red dots and 100,000 Iraqi casualties represented by dots in green UV ink, which only shows up under a blacklight. During the performance the names of the dead were read off. visitors were asked to donate $1 to fund scholarships for Americans and Iraqis who lost parents in the war.
In May 2007, Bilal began a 30-day-long project called Domestic Tension in protest of the Iraq War. Bial was confined to a small room in the gallery in Chicago. He had cameras on him twenty-four hours a day connected to the internet. There was also a remote-controlled paintball gun that viewers could use to shoot him at any time. The gun fired yellow paint balls and emitted a sound as loud as a semiautomatic gun each time it went off. With the click of a mouse, online participants could become soldiers, firing a paintball gun that could cause real (if non-lethal) harm to Bilal. Internet users were drawn by the promise of “shooting an Iraqi."
For a considerable time after Domestic Tension ended, he suffered PTSD and couldn’t sleep without medication.
In the hugely popular video game Quest for Saddam, gamers fight the evil Iraqi forces and try to capture and kill Saddam Hussein. Al Qaeda did its own take, creating an online video game using the structure of Quest for Saddam, but adding a new “skin” to turn the game into a hunt for Bush: Bilal created a computer-based art piece titled Night of Bush Capturing: Virtual Jihadi in which the artist casts himself as a suicide bomber who gets sent on a mission to assassinate President George W. Bush.
His work can be found in permanent collections in Los Angeles, Chicago and Doha amongst others. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was conferred an honorary PhD from DePauw University.
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