Wafaa Bilal “Domestic Tension,” 2007Photo: Wafaa Bilal

In early spring of 2007 artist Wafaa Bilal, whom I represented at FLATFILEgalleries, met with me to go over the plan for an upcoming solo show. We had settled on his “Human Condition” series months before. In 2006, I had shown his video installation, “Fourth of July,” in the lower-level project room to much acclaim and discussion. The video loop showed the bombing of Baghdad layered with the Fourth of July fireworks at Navy Pier. It was a powerful piece, shown small in the darkened room to invite intimacy. Wafaa has a sixth sense for creating effective political art, and I was eager for his show.

Wafaa sat across from me at my desk in the back office and said he’d really like to change what he would show. I listened, interested, as he told me how he’d like to live in a created environment in the gallery for a month, and what he planned to do during that time. Being a gallerist who didn’t believe in censoring my artists, I nodded assent—until he said he wanted to call the show “Shoot an Iraqi.” I clearly remember saying no and shaking my head—the West Loop wasn’t the party neighborhood it is now; there were still a whole lot of meat packers who were definitely not liberals, and I was afraid that the title, emblazoned across the front window, might just be tempting to some individuals in the area. Wafaa was a little disappointed, but we hashed it out and came up with the title “Domestic Tension”—domestic because he was planning to move into the gallery for a month, and tension, well, that described the project but was subtle enough to be intriguing. As the move-in date approached, I realized that we had two wedding rentals scheduled during the run of the show and reached out to the couples asking if they’d be okay with Wafaa being resident in the large main floor project room. Both couples agreed, none of us knowing what the piece would eventually entail.

Over the course of the month, Bilal was inviting the audience, both in-person and around the world via internet remote control, to shoot at him with a paintball gun, while they interacted with him via camera feed and live chat. Over that time, Wafaa kept a daily journal which was later included in a book, “Shoot An Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun” that he co-authored with  Kari Lyderson.

Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007/Photo: Wafaa Bilal

Wafaa was born in Kufa, Iraq in 1966, the third of seven children of a volatile, difficult father and a dutiful, complacent mother, and by the time we met, he had been through more in his then-forty years than most people experience in a lifetime. He was in his early teens when Saddam Hussein came to power and systematically murdered whole families of communists, dissidents and educated people. Saddam “benevolently” gave out televisions and installed electricity so his propaganda could be viewed by the populace. In the guise of generosity, Saddam was brainwashing an entire country. He passed a law that everyone between the ages of fifteen and forty-five must learn to read and write or risk prison. Many Iraqis, particularly women, could not read. Wafaa’s mother learned to read for the first time—but the books assigned were all about Saddam and his heroism. The paranoid Saddam had snitches throughout the city. When the regime was toppled, the Bilal family learned the neighborhood snitch was the local barber. When Wafaa was in his teens, to get away from his father’s violence, he volunteered for the Ba’ath Party’s summer youth military training program. He was deemed too small for the program and so was sent to the Saudi border as a guard. The Iraq-Iran conflict was in full swing, and the oil fields needed guarding, where, in all the time Wafaa spent alone, he got to know himself and came to understand the deviousness of Saddam’s regime.

Wafaa was accepted to college in Baghdad, but was disappointed when he could not study art. Still, he found artist friends and, as the saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Never one to keep his ideology under wraps, by the time he was in Baghdad, Wafaa was making paintings that mocked the government. Afraid of repercussions, he rolled them up and hid them in his sister’s hollow bedpost. He photographed poor people in the worst areas of Baghdad and continued to make anti-government paintings for which he was harassed by security officials. One of his shows was shut down. We in America have no idea what it’s like to have your every movement legislated and choreographed by your government. As an act of self-preservation, Wafaa turned to abstract artmaking—the emotions were there, but not clearly decipherable.

When the United States began bombing Iraq in 1991, Wafaa was back in Kufa, creating anti-government paintings once again, which terrified his family. He lived in an aunt’s empty house, alone and painting, and when he visited his family in their home with no electricity or running water, he noticed that the adults were playing with the children, laughing and trying to have a good time, which he saw not only as a form of survival, but of resistance. Wafaa longed to leave Iraq, to leave the troubles behind. Painting could only give him so much freedom, and it wasn’t lasting. He began going to the Kufa bridge daily, a ritual that soothed him. One day when he stayed home painting, the bridge was bombed by the United States, killing dozens of people including a wedding party. He joined the swell of people rushing to the scene, gathering up twisted metal, body parts and bits of torn cloth, and throwing them into the river, gasping from the smells and sights.

Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007/Photo: Kirk Gittings

When the United States launched its ground war in Kuwait on February 23, 1991, it was over in a hundred hours. Saddam agreed to pull out of Kuwait, leaving burning oil fields and nearly 100,000 dead or maimed, but still claimed it as a victory. For the first time Iraqis were not afraid to speak or act against the regime—Saddam had lost, and chaos and violence broke out across the nation. Soldiers marched home in their underwear, discarding the hated uniforms along the way as a declaration that they no longer supported any regime as well as to avoid being attacked by the mob. But the bombings continued in Iraq—Saddam had turned on his own people, and there was nowhere safe. Executions were commonplace and people disappeared and were never seen again. Chaos reigned. Wafaa found his family in an abandoned schoolhouse, living with several other families, and had to say goodbye or risk endangering them all. He was wanted for not fighting and left on foot hoping to reach the border. The worst was yet to come. Wafaa was captured, interrogated and beaten by Kuwaitis, who blamed all Iraqis for the war. He was sent to a refugee camp along with an ever-increasing population of Iraqis. Conditions were abysmal and each day was worse than the one before. Then, after the Saudis had agreed to take Iraqi refugees and courtesy of the persistence of an American soldier, Wafaa was flown to Saudi Arabia on a military jet.

In that country, the refugees were driven through the desert, coated with gritty dust, to a newly built camp holding 20,000 other Iraqis. Within days, the Americans left, and the Saudis were in charge. Now it was worse than the other camp. After three months summer came—120-degree days filled with violence and fear. Conditions in the camp deteriorated until it was nearly unbearable. “It made no sense, Wafaa says, “but I always wanted to create a home, even in the most unlikely places.” And so he set out to build an adobe hut in the camp using the sand, clay and runoff water from the kitchens, baking the bricks in the heat of the sun. Over time, other refugees in the camp built huts of their own in hope of creating a community. When winter came, there was more warmth than their tents could provide.

A year into his stay at the Saudi camp, there was an uprising—a group of women had had their fill of abuse, surrounded the guards, stole their weapons, and held them hostage. They were joined by other Iraqis and tents were set afire. The standoff lasted a week until the refugees’ demands were met, then they were moved to another camp in which Wafaa and other artists made friends with a U.S.-educated officer who appreciated their art, bought them art supplies, and provided them with the intellectual companionship they had missed for so long.

Word was out that the United States was willing to take some of the refugees. Interviews were set up, and Wafaa was able to be interviewed on behalf of both his brother and himself. Ultimately, both their names were on the list of those who would be flown to the United States. The day came to leave, and amid tears and hugs, those fortunate to be leaving flew first to Paris, then to New York, and finally to Albuquerque.

Wafaa interviewed for the art program at the University of New Mexico and was told to learn English and come back. He studied while taking a job making cabinets, and eventually spoke enough English to enter the university to study art, earning a BFA, finding some mentors and friends. His interactive piece, “Absinthe Drinker” won an award from the New Mexico Museum of Art. His honors thesis was an exhibition that prompted a great deal of controversy, and he was off and running at last. He was accepted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to study for an MFA. There is so, so much more. I want you to understand the life Wafaa came from, but I also want to talk about where he’s gone since then, most importantly about the thirty-one days he spent in my gallery during “Domestic Tension.”

Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007/Photo: Kirk Gittings

In the days leading up to Friday May 4, 2007, Wafaa and his team created a studio apartment in FLATFILE’s large white project space that usually housed video art. There was a bed that doubled as a couch, a coffee table, a lamp, a rolling office chair, a stationary bike and a computer monitor. To the right as you entered was the “gun” that shot the paintballs and an enormous number of boxes of refills. The room was large with a fifteen-foot ceiling, all of it painted pristine white. We had no idea what would happen but thought we were ready for anything. Little did we know. The opening went on as usual—dozens of people gathered to see the shows, two downstairs and two on the main floor, one of which was “Domestic Tension.” Just before 5pm, the team plugged in all the equipment, and we blew a circuit breaker. Because the gallery, as well as the loft upstairs I shared with my husband and dogs, had been a factory without large machinery until we gutted and rehabbed it, we hadn’t anticipated any reason we’d need this level of power.

By the end of the night, not a lot had happened other than a foolish guy who stripped off his shirt and stood in front of the gun, letting one paintball splatter his belly and then showing it off throughout the gallery. Wafaa and his friend Ben tried to have an artist talk, with Ben behind a plexiglass panel, but a paintball shattered the panel, so they gave up on that. As gallery guests drank wine and conversed, the shots grew more frequent, particularly someone, from Shabbona, Illinois, firing. I know that the ticking sound of the gun while people aimed to fire was what upset Wafaa most. That and the paintball that hit his mask, dribbling yellow fish oil under his mask and down his face behind it. At the end of the night, I turned out the gallery lights, other than those in Wafaa’s room, and went upstairs. My husband and I had discussed the project, and we were both in full support of Wafaa and “Domestic Tension.” Neither of us knew what a month of this would be like though—our bedroom was directly above the project room.

Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007/Photo: Shawn Lawson

Days one through seven were uneventful. The shooting was steady, but not crazy. Wafaa was vigilant about dodging the paintballs, but, as he wrote “it was mundane.” I brought old towels to keep up with the encroaching yellow goo. In his book, he compared it to how in a war zone in Iraq, “you must be constantly cleaning up and repairing the damage done, even though you know your work will likely just be destroyed again.” The gun malfunctioned and was replaced. On day eight, Wafaa, who taught at the School of the Art Institute, held his class critiques in the gallery. During the critique, because of a Chicago Tribune story that had been published the day before, reporters came, and both BBC and CNN called to ask for interviews. Rather than being annoyed, Wafaa used it as an example for the students of how art can reach out into the world, crossing boundaries and creating dialogue between art and media. On day nine, a wedding was held in the gallery, fueled, as Wafaa says, by alcohol. People were either interested or not, but the bride and groom addressed Wafaa, albeit drunkenly, about the project. Wafaa was amused by one of the DJ’s last song picks—“I Will Survive.” He thought it appropriate.

On day nine, the lamp, which had been hit several times, got unplugged. It sparked, and I was afraid of a broken bulb or a fire from the paintball chemicals. I had installed an extra phone in the room in case Wafaa needed help and I was washing the towels he mopped up the paintball mess with in my washing machine. The walls and floor were already solid yellow, and the color oozed down the drywall it would soon eat through. It was a shot from Estonia that killed the lamp—the lamp that Wafaa left on to keep the PTSD he had long suffered from at bay. This was the first time during the project that Wafaa wept. On day ten, he taped over the floor vents because the paint was dripping down to the art-storage area on the lower level. Strangely, the gun was silent. Wafaa called the tech team who quickly realized that the server had flooded and was down. Serendipitously, a young man named Jason, who had read the article in the Tribune, walked into the gallery and offered help. He placed a call to a high-ranking company and asked to speak to the CEO, apparently a friend of his. They talked and he was promised a designated server. Jason became, in Wafaa’s words, his “techie guardian angel,” someone he could call day or night, someone who would always pick up and always fix what was wrong, even giving moral support and kind words when he could see, monitoring the site, that Wafaa was vulnerable or distressed.

On day eleven, a smiling, clean-shaven young guy walked into the gallery carrying a lamp. He said that he was just out of the Marines and that the project made him see things in a new light, allowing him to view his adversaries as human. He had chosen a taller lamp to replace the broken one because it was too tall for the gun to hit. Wafaa said the box showed the lamp in an all-white apartment that looked like the space had when he moved in, before the paintballs. He had been ready to give up the project, but this visit restored his faith in humanity. On day twelve, the paintball-store owner drove into the city (from an hour away) to bring air canisters and paintballs that he was donating to the project. He had taken an interest in the project—another person outside the art world that Wafaa had reached.

Wafaa Bilal “Domestic Tension,” 2007/Photo: Kirk Gittings

On day thirteen some of the shooters realized that they could open multiple browser windows to fire multiple times. Someone in Milwaukee sent a message, “I’m giving you a nineteen-gun salute!” as they fired from nineteen browser windows. Wafaa’s Iraqi friend, who was a war photojournalist, came into the gallery and said he could feel the tension the minute he walked in the door. He told Wafaa, “A lot of people ask me about war because I’ve seen so much of it, but most of the time I cannot tell them what war is. This project shows exactly what it is. It’s not a video game. I see you sitting there in fear; you are a human being.”

Both friends and strangers brought food for Wafaa—so much that he gained twenty pounds that month. He must have eaten from fear, anxiety, and partly due to the way he had grown up, often not knowing when he would eat again. By day fourteen, the plexiglass shields were shattered again. My gallery assistant helped Wafaa install thicker ones. On day fifteen the room looked terrifying. Wafaa said the scene was “like some natural disaster, only it wasn’t natural—it was a man-made disaster, like war.” I’d have to agree. The gelatin shrapnel stuck onto the interior of the dryer when I washed the sheets, and the awful smell of fish oil extended from the gallery to my laundry room. Later that day, in the room as clean as we all could make it, someone from Columbus, Ohio began shooting non-stop. Eventually Wafaa entered the chat room and wrote “Hey Columbus, I am having dinner, and your paintballs are falling into it.” The shooter wrote back, “Ouch, sorry about that,” and stopped shooting. Wafaa saw it as evidence of the power of communication from human being to human being.

Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007/Photo: Kirk Gittings

On day sixteen the gun started firing nonstop. Hackers had figured out a way to turn the device into a submachine gun. The project had surfaced on Digg.com where so many people had “digged” the Tribune piece that the story was spreading across cyberspace. The chatroom was filled with hate, racism, venom. Wafaa was stretched to the limit. He disconnected the compressed-air canister so the gun wouldn’t shoot, but the shooters didn’t know so they kept firing—the gun still moved from side to side and the trigger compressed, but no paintballs came out. The room was so covered in yellow, they couldn’t tell. Wafaa was losing it and lay down on the bed but couldn’t stand the idea of giving up, so he got up, ran around the room in front of the gun as if he was being hit, dodging and ducking, an award-winning performance. In reality, he was prepared to halt the project, and only this playacting kept him going. Later the same day something remarkable happened— the internet was exploding with the words “aim left, save the guy.” It was everywhere online, and it was working; when the gun fired left it couldn’t possibly hit Wafaa. A small blessing, but he was running out of paintballs again, and even though my assistant tried to convince him to cancel the project, Wafaa held fast and by day eighteen he was ready to keep going, feeling he had only himself to blame for this situation because it was of his own making.

On day nineteen, a student brought him a little tree. By the end of the day, it was also shot to bits. On day twenty his computer monitor died from being coated in the paint. On day twenty-one he realized that the project and those who were in touch, either through the gun or in the chat rooms, were using it as a confessional, a way to express racism, a forum for philosophical discussion, and strangely, and weirdly, a platform for flirting. It seemed Wafaa and the project had filled a need for many people and their personal issues.

By day twenty-two, he was pleased with the project again, other than health problems—rashes, chest and abdominal pains, shortness of breath, the list goes on. Plus the resurgence of PTSD, which brought with it paranoia, insomnia and nightmares. I washed the sheets, but they were coated in yellow within an hour or two. There was another wedding in the gallery on day twenty-three. The wedding couple asked Wafaa to disconnect the gun during their vows. He broke down in the ensuing silence, weeping into the camera, but resolved to finish the month. All the hours the gun was firing nonstop, especially during the nights, my husband and I recoiled from the shots upstairs—it was loudest in our bedroom and in the kitchen and it never stopped. Because the internet is worldwide, in so many time zones, there were shooters firing 24/7. We were not under the gun as Wafaa was, but our hearts (and ears) were with him.

On day twenty-four Wafaa was pondering the project and the meaning of hope—from the negative, “I hope it hits you in the head” to the positive, “hope your lungs will recover.” The word hope came up at least thirty times a day in the chat log—Wafaa collected them. On day twenty-five, which was Memorial Day in the United States, the gun fired nonstop. Perhaps it was because Americans were off work, or because those abroad saw significance in our holiday, but either way, the room had turned into a yellow cesspool, in Wafaa’s words. He saw the gun as a phallic object, as a “physical extension of the male aggressive drive to dominate” and that disturbed him “to his inner soul.” On day twenty-six, his supplier, who had become a friend, ran out of paintballs again, but still found a way to get some more. Wafaa was so close to the end of the month he believed he could make it.

Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007/Photo: Luis Mayorga

On day twenty-seven, two packages arrived—Peace Lily plants from a former classmate. Wafaa wept and hugged the plants to his chest. On day twenty-eight, another miracle—a group calling themselves The Virtual Human Shield took control of the gun, clicking left so the paintballs wouldn’t hit Wafaa, like what happened on day sixteen, but this time it was organized. The group even made a schedule so there would be someone manning the gun every hour of every day, forming a cyber political resistance. The leader of the group also brought clean socks for Wafaa after noticing how paint-soaked his had become—small acts of kindness that carried huge emotional impact. Day twenty-nine, looking at himself in the gallery bathroom mirror, Wafaa felt many things, but apathy most of all. He knew he’d finish the project, he was in the homestretch, but with what consequences to his physical and emotional health?

Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007/Photo: Kirk Gittings

On day thirty, on which was to have been the last day of the project, jubilant at the prospect of successfully completing it, Wafaa decided to extend it a day. The Virtual Human Shield had thirty-nine people protecting him day and night, battling another 200 who wanted to shoot him. Another peace lily plant arrived with the message “From a grateful left-clicker. The world is a better place because of people like you.” On day thirty-one, just before 5pm in the afternoon, Wafaa raised his fist in a victory salute, stood up and thanked all those who helped with the project in one way or another. The gun fired and a paintball splattered on his chest while the crowd counted down: 15, 14…10, 9, 8… 4, 3, 2, 1! Wafaa walked low, avoiding the nonstop paintballs in the air, and disconnected the gun. He stood up before the dozens of people and reporters gathered in the gallery and spoke, “We silenced one gun today and I hope we will silence all guns in the future.” He slipped off his goggles, dripping paint and popped out his earplugs. Walking through the throng, he stepped out the front door of the gallery into lightly falling rain and breathed fresh air for the first time in a month.

Rendering of “Lamassu,” 2024. Courtesy of the artist

Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq), “Virtual Jihadi” (still), 2008. Courtesy of the artist

Wafaa is still creating projects that challenge both himself and the system. Whether he’s building an Iraqi home in California that he then plans to blow up, implanting a camera in the back of his head, or having his back tattooed with one dot for every Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell, Wafaa puts his own body on the line again and again, using it as the canvas for his art. “I am nothing if not a storyteller,” he says. “My work to date has been concerned with the communication of public and private information to an audience so that it may be retold, distributed. The stories I tell are political dramas, which unfold through my past experience and into the present where they interact with the currency of media as the dialectic of aesthetic pleasure and pain… with an audience locked in participation, my story may be retold.” Recreating the room of “Domestic Tension” at the MCA will not evoke the feelings, neither for Wafaa nor for the public, but no story more deserves to be told. The project, in which there were 65,000 shots fired from 128 countries, and 80 million hits on the site, was not only an international phenomenon, but an ideal example of art news becoming world news, which is a rare occurrence. Riffing on Wafaa’s contemplation of the word “hope” and its many meanings, I hope the messages of this project continue to echo for many more years—we could definitely use them.

Even though we used a barrier primer on the walls and floor multiple times and repainted dozens of times over the next two years, we were never able to cover the yellow or fully repair the drywall—it bled through like something from a B-grade horror movie. I closed FLATFILEgalleries in 2009 to concentrate on my own art and Chicago Artists Coalition moved in as a tenant until we sold the building in 2016 to the Indonesian Government for their Consulate and Community Center. When we moved out, there were still bits of paintball shrapnel in the dryer, and the smell of fish oil lingered.

“Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art on February 1 and runs through October 19. It will include a reconstruction of the FlatFile room used for “Domestic Tension,”  along with four other major works from Bilal’s practice.