Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal’s recent work turns the topicality of its subject matter––the horrors of war in the artist’s native Iraq, which he fled as a dissident in the run-up to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait––into a set of chilling meditations on photography and representation, outrage and loss, and the long-distance violence of technologically mediated warfare in the digital age. The ambiguous evidentiary character of the war-zone photograph––and of the stories it tells––plays an organizing role in this overtly political body of work. Chair, 2009, is a large-format image of an elaborate dollhouse reconstruction based on a scene captured in 2003 by photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg in one of Saddam Hussein’s war-ravaged palaces. The installation Samarra, 2009, allows visitors to perform the same trick for themselves: The viewfinder of a battered Pentax embedded in the gallery’s wall opens onto a dioramic re-creation of a ruined mosque interior in Fallujah, destroyed by American bombs in 2004.
Bilal is perhaps best known for his 2007 performance piece Domestic Tension, which took shape in response to the 2005 death of his brother, killed by an unmanned American Predator drone in Iraq. It is represented here by a life-size reconstruction of the ersatz bedroom the artist inhabited for thirty days at the now-closed Flatfile Galleries in Chicago. Watched round-the-clock via webcam, Bilal invited online visitors to “shoot an Iraqi” with a remote-controlled paintball gun. Some forty thousand paintballs later, the room’s paint-spattered walls and furniture bear mute witness to the sharp aim of Bilal’s provocation and the remarkable lengths he was willing to go to turn what he calls his “comfort zone” into a “conflict zone.” Silenced and stilled here, the scene takes on the hushed atmosphere of a battlefield memorial hastily erected before the end of a war.
