Shoot an Iraqi
December 10, 2008
photo: Chicago Tribune
Shoot An Iraqi, Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, is the name of the book by Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi born artist currently an assistant professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and author and journalist Kari Lydersen (Amazon UK and USA.)
Fortunately, I had a chance to visit Wafaa Bilal (who is a great human being) during his one-month experience as a paintball target at Flatfile Galleries. In this gallery he created an “unsettling interactive performancepiece” called “Domestic Tension.” For one month, Bilal lived alone in a replica of his bedroom in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to internet viewers. On his website (Crude Oils), visitors from around the world were able to shoot at him 24 hours a day. After different news broadcasts released the information, the virtual audience grew by the thousands and became worldwide.
photo: Chicago Tribune
photo: Chicago Tribune
photo: Dimitris Michalaros
This book is published by City Lights
“Once I picked up this manuscript, I could not put it down. There is something so urgent and compelling about Bilal’s story, as though he is speaking to our time. His story is not just for those interested in the arts; it is a human story of the horror, frustration, and tragedies of war.”
—Mary Flanagan, artist and author of re:skin (MIT Press)
“This is an unsettling and gripping book. It poignantly recounts a dark and imaginative experiment inspired by an excruciating and ghastly reality. Its unsettling effects couldn’t be more welcome: we desperately need to be shocked out of our collective zombification, and this book does that by leading us through a wild labyrinth at once aesthetic, political, and existential. Potent stuff.”
—Danny Postel, author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran
post by Wanderlust
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