The second lecture I attended was given by Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal. Wafaa left Iraq as a refugee during the first gulf war in 1991, and he currently lives in the United States. He showed us some of the work he has done over the last decade or so, much of it dealing with the Iraq war and his own losses. Both his brother and his father were civilian casualties of the conflict.
One of the pieces that really propelled him into the public consciousness was his "Shoot an Iraqi" project, which he showed photos and videos from. In the piece, he lived in a gallery in Chicago for one month with a web-controlled paintball gun, which users were invited to shoot at him with. It was a very interesting exploration of the disconnect people felt between faceless civilian casualties and an individual person. He also showed us "Iraqi or Dog?", in which he was water-boarded, and "Civilian Casualties", in which he had a map of Iraqi civilian casualties tattooed on his back in UV ink. One piece he showed that has recently garnered attention was a camera implanted to the back of his head, which broadcasts an image a minute of whatever is behind him. He had the website up on a separate screen, showing the images taken during the lecture. I felt that Bilal's work was very powerful in the way that it related his own personal experiences to the devastation of his country, and then acted as a sort of avatar for the country itself.
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