Curated by Bana Kattan
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, the social news aggregator digg.com reposted a Chicago Tribune report about a live website on which anyone could “shoot an Iraqi” via a remotely controlled paintball gun. That Iraqi was Wafaa Bilal, and the site provided entry to Domestic Tension, 2007, a cyber-performance by the artist that quickly went viral. Utilizing the appeal of massively multiplayer online (or MMO) video games, Domestic Tension lured participants into reenacting the remote violence of drone warfare. Bilal lived for a month at Chicago’s FLATFILE Gallery for this project. The website received eighty million hits, and he was shot at some sixty-five thousand times by participants from 128 countries. Not all the pellets, however, struck his body. Some players realized that they could alter the trajectory of the gun, steering it away from Bilal. The gallery was gradually covered in a yellow pigment (containing fish oil) as thousands of misses accumulated. A vast online chat room operated by Bilal collected an outpouring of hate speech and some expressions of support. The artist himself suffers from PTSD from Domestic Tension to this day.
Bilal’s art is heavy—he works through personal as well as collective traumas, including war, migration, and the death of his brother, who was killed in Iraq by an American drone strike in 2004. For “Indulge Me,” Bilal’s midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, curator Bana Kattan wisely presents only five pieces, giving viewers the space to slowly and fully absorb each project. This show negotiates two forms of obsolescence: One relates to digital media of a certain age, while the other focuses on Iraq as a political flash point, which today has been eclipsed (at least in terms of media attention) by invasions of other vulnerable places by world powers. Bilal saw Domestic Tension as grafting the conflict zone of Iraq onto what he calls the “comfort zone” of the United States, where he arrived as a refugee in 1992. The interior of FLATFILE is reproduced here, with a new paintball gun restaging thousands of misses to again cover the walls in a sickly yellow. Examples of the live feed and chat add to an intentionally fragmented sense of a performance caught between the internet and real life, as well as our current moment and the real-time “present” of the work. Our amnesiac distance from this war is readily apparent in the obsolescence of its participatory prompt, and we are left to consider similar targets of opprobrium in Trump’s United States.
In the next gallery is 3rdi, 2010–11, made when Bilal had a camera surgically attached to the back of his head for more than a year; the images it captured were remotely uploaded to a website at a rate of one per minute. At the MCA, the pictures are synced to the time and day they were first captured, roughly fifteen years ago. The artist saw the project as a poetic attempt to recover the lost memories of his migrations through different countries, with the back of his head positioned as the immediate past that he was perpetually leaving behind. Of course, many of the photographs are banal, depicting nondescript walls, rooms, streets, and airports. Surprisingly few of the people we see have shocked expressions; perhaps Bilal was passing by too quickly for them to make sense of the implant. He was, however, questioned at length by transportation security agents on at least one occasion, representing potential risks to his freedom. The camera was also giving him infections, which ultimately forced Bilal to have it removed. By literally placing his body on the line with Domestic Tension and 3rdi, Bilal found ways to viscerally materialize the digital within a recognizable convention of performance art.
The next work in the show, Virtual Jihadi, 2008, hacks a jingoistic video game, Petrilla Entertainment’s Quest for Saddam, 2003, that Al Qaeda had already hacked into and retitled The Night of Bush Capturing. In each, enemy combatants bear the face of a villainous leader, either Saddam Hussein or George W. Bush, in a synecdoche of individual for nation. Bilal added a suicide bomber, bearing his own visage, to his version of the game, situating both the US and Iraqi sides as the enemy and celebrating all those, like the artist, who are alienated or disgusted by war. At the MCA, the game can be played at a mock-up of an internet café circa 2005, with one computer inevitably labeled OUT OF ORDER.
The more recent works here explore the possibilities, both archival and comedic, of miniaturization. Lamassu (In a Grain of Wheat), 2025, encodes a 3D scan of a statue of the Lamassu of Nineveh into the DNA of individual grains of wheat. The scan was taken from one of the world’s last remaining Lamassu sculptures (ancient representations of the Assyrian deity were destroyed by ISIS in 2015), which resides in the permanent collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The kernels, which viewers are allowed to take, spill out of a reproduction of the figure, turning the guardian god into a seed bank that defends against fundamentalist iconoclasm and Western cultural appropriation. Thumbsat Satellite, 2024, a meditation on Hussein’s corrosive iconicity, appears in the final gallery. The project is based on an alleged plan by Iraq’s Ba’ath Party to launch a statue of Hussein into space, symbolically allowing the deceased dictator to surveil his people for all eternity. Bilal created a gold-plated bust of the once-imposing ruler, only inches high, that eventually will be launched into the lower layer of Earth’s atmosphere. There, it will gradually and harmlessly disintegrate—an anti-monument to the vanity of all despots.
In August, the MCA will reprise Bilal’s 2016 performance-lecture that took place at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He was not given an honorarium for this piece—the artist was told by the institution that staging a work at its illustrious venue was going to be his fee. In response to this, Bilal invited a group of Arab stand-ups to tell jokes for the event, also sans payment, which is fairly standard in the realm of comedy—the opportunity to try out material is considered compensation in and of itself. We would, however, be remiss to see this partnership as a mere provocation. What are the Arab stand-ups really standing in for? At the very least, they represent an act of solidarity between Bilal and fellow Middle Eastern artists who are doing what they can to make ends meet in a xenophobic country. As for Bilal, he continues to evolve and take on different roles—from performance artist to problem solver—to address various conflicts while testing out the limits of his own comfort zone.
Daniel R. Quiles is an associate professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
