Wafaa Bilal

               After doing some research Wafaa Bilal caught my eye as a performance artist because he takes it to a whole new level. He makes the viewer question the world they live in and the actions, like war, that have become a part of our culture. One piece that I found really interesting was called “…and Counting” which was completed in 2010. The 24-hour performance was Bilal receiving a series of tattoos and “carvings” on his back along with a borderless map tattoo of Iraq. The 5,000 red “carvings” were representing the American causalities in the Iraq war and the 10,000 tattooed dots can only be seen in ultra violet light and represent the “unidentified and forgotten Iraq victims.” So he used his body as a way to help show the pain that he had to deal with when his brother was killed in Iraq by a missile. “Bilal feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who’ve lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public.”
              He also used his body in a piece called “3rdi” where he had a live-feed camera surgically mounted into the back of his head to comment on the surveillance that happens in America these days. In another piece called “Domestic Tension” he lived in a gallery space for a month and people were able to observe him from a webcam and shoot him with paint balls. He was exploring the concept of war, the Iraq war in particular, and political themes in today’s society. He tries to mimic the pain and suffering of war through his pieces. His body is the main part of all of his pieces, but he also puts himself in confined spaces, like the gallery, to show how he is limited due to the government and because of his racial background and the implications surrounding it. Since his work is usually pain being inflicted upon himself, his pieces are usually documented with photographs and sometimes videos to show the events themselves, like getting tattooed. Watching his work is sometimes hard to watch because imagine getting hit/shot at by 60,000 paint balls. The viewers can imagine the pain he is in and therefore maybe begin to imagine the pain that surround war and all of the causalities associated with fighting one another.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcyquvDEe0o

Bilal, Wafaa, and Kari Lydersen. Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life And Resistance Under the Gun. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2008.

Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Rev. ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001.