I can’t think of a more relevant and necessary exhibition right now than Wafaa Bilal’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It isn’t only that the exhibition is topical—though, sadly, its critiques of Islamophobia and the ways technology sanitizes warfare and distances us from its effects are timely. (Bilal takes on these topics unflinchingly, but we hardly need an art show to remind us of them.) Instead, what stands out is the way his faith in humanity carries on despite it all.
After learning that his brother had been killed by a remotely operated drone in Iraq, and after relocating as a refugee to the United States, Bilal took up residence in Chicago’s Flat File galleries for 30 days. For the resulting performance, Domestic Tension (2007), he connected a paintball gun to a video feed and chatroom, where people identified only by IP addresses could shoot yellow paintballs at a brown man in a keffiyeh. And shoot they did: in a surprise to no one, the relative anonymity of the internet enabled the unleashing of racialized hatred. Bilal was shot more than 65,000 times, and the site received more than 80 million hits.
But more memorable for Bilal were the moments of selfless kindness and basic respect that other strangers offered. When an Ohio-based IP address went at him relentlessly, Bilal politely asked for a break from the shooting: he was trying to eat dinner, and paintballs kept falling into his food. The shooter obliged, replying “Ouch, sorry.” Soon, users discovered that if they repeatedly clicked left and aimed the gun into a corner of a room, Bilal would be spared, and so 39 strangers organized shifts to protect him. He was so moved that he extended the project an extra day, saying moments like these had restored his hope for humankind.
Where politics and technology can abstract, time and again, Bilal brings things back to person-to-person scale, and he does so by putting his own body on the line. Such is the premise of Virtual Jihadi (2007), a remake of a remake of the popular 2003 American video game Quest for Saddam. In the earliest version of this first-person shooter game, players kill off civilian Iraqis standing between the shooter and Saddam Hussein. Tellingly, every Iraqi has the same face—Hussein’s. Three years later, Al Qaeda released their own version, changing it into a hunt for George W. Bush. Bilal’s version intervenes by introducing a third character: an Iraqi suicide bomber who, angered after his brother is killed by the US, is recruited to join a terrorist group. In this third version, both Al Qaeda and the US are the enemies, with the focus on figureheads clearing way for the people they most impact. Here technology onboards and recruits people to violence while alienating them from the impacts of war.
View of “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
For 3rdi (2010–11), Bilal surgically installed a camera in the back of his head and, for one year, took a picture every minute. The abundant photos show things like pillows and strangers, and in a sense compensate, per the catalog, for the childhood photos Bilal left behind when he fled Iraq. The work is shown synchronically, meaning if you visit the show on March 27, 2025, at 4:32 pm, you will see what Bilal saw—or rather, didn’t see—on March 27, 2011, at 4:32 pm. The images are projected on a screen hung at a dramatic angle, giving the project a commanding presence in much the same way Bilal’s camera intruded into any given space. This was the point: Surveillance cameras are everywhere yet disappear; what if you could see the person on the other end?
Titled “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me,” the MCA show is hands-down the best museum presentation of past performances I have ever seen. Domestic Tension is shown as a room reproduced to scale, and though the museum shot far fewer than 65,000 paintballs at its walls, the presence of their yellow residue is chilling. Nearby, the live-streamed project is edited down into a thoughtful and manageable five minutes.
View of “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Bilal’s most permanent gesture is also his smallest. Responding to ISIS’s destruction of pre-Islamic culture, he took to 3D scanning a lamassu, a sphynx-like sculpture of a protective Sumerian goddess, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection after a similar and significant one had been destroyed near Mosul. Wanting to preserve the form against future political upheaval while also hiding it from the enemy, he compressed the file and then bioengineered it to appear in the DNA of wheat seeds. Among the first crops to be domesticated in the Fertile Crescent that the lamassu calls home, these wheat seeds—which visitors to the MCA can take away with them—are a reminder that small gestures can be powerful, too.
Smallness, though, is antithetical to traditional ideas of empire and authority—which is why Bilal responded to one of Saddam Hussein’s most far-out ideas by scaling it down. The Ba’ath leader had proposed sending a golden bust of himself into space and geo-tethering it to Iraq so that he could look over the nation in perpetuity. It was never realized—until now, by Bilal and in diminutive form. During the run of the show, he will send it up into low Earth orbit where, rather than reigning forever, it will fall back down to the ground and disintegrate.