Wafaa Bilal

The inspiration for Domestic Tension stemmed from Bilal's experiences in refugee camps during the rule of Saddam Hussein, losing members of his family in the war, and trying to cope with the reality of war as it raged on the other side of the world. One day, Bilal learned that his people were being killed by soldiers who were not even stationed in Iraq—they had the power to shoot missiles "from an armchair in front of a computer somewhere, as if it were all some kind of video game." Frightened by how easily soldiers (and Americans) could distance themselves from the terrors of war, Bilal used Domestic Tension as a way to constantly remind himself of the horrors going on in Iraq.

Wafaa was asked to participate in a net art piece called Dog or Iraqi while an artist in residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He let his audience decide which one – a dog named "Buddy," or an Iraqi, himself – will be waterboarded at an "undisclosed location" in upstate New York. He was the one who got water-boarded.

Bilal's The 3rd I project was exhibited in the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar on December 30, 2010. Bilal had a titanium plate implanted in the back of his head, to which a camera was attached. For one year, which began December 15, 2010, an image was captured once per minute and streamed live to www.3rdi.me and the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. The website also showed his location via GPS. Bilal said that he wanted to capture the mundane while not knowingly taking the pictures. In an attempt to assuage privacy concerns, Bilal's university required him to cover the camera while on campus. On February 4, 2011, Bilal had the camera removed due to constant pain.

Wafaa Bilal was invited by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in late February 2008 to present a lecture on this latest work. On March 6, the day after Wafaa's lecture, the RPI administration said they would not allow the exhibit to be supported on campus, and has since declined to reopen it. The decision came after the College Republicans called the Arts department "a safe haven for terrorists" on their blog. The statement has since been retracted. The Institute has been subsequently criticized by advocates of free speech and artistic freedom.

In May 2007, Bilal began a 30-day-long project called Domestic Tension in protest of the Iraq War. During the installation piece, Bilal confined himself to a small room at the FlatFile Galleries, located in Chicago. Although the artist was confined, he could be seen twenty-four hours a day through a camera that he had connected to the Internet. In addition to the camera, Bilal set up a remote controlled paintball gun that viewers could use to shoot him at any time. The gun shot foul-smelling yellow paint and emitted a sound as loud as a semiautomatic gun each time it went off.

For example, his work Raze 213 had viewers smell a piece of meat decaying in acid; it was shut down by the New Mexico health authorities. It was a reference to a torture technique used by Saddam Hussein of dripping nitric acid randomly on prisoners. In August 2007 in San Francisco he recreated rooms of destroyed houses from Iraq, covered in ash, some from human remains.

In 1992 he travelled to the United States to study art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, from which he graduated with a BFA in 1999. He later moved to Chicago, where he earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003, and became an adjunct assistant professor the following year. In addition to his art he has given lectures about Saddam Hussein's regime and was interviewed by the History Channel. Wafaa's brother was killed by a U.S. missile strike at a checkpoint in 2004, something which deepened his condemnation of the Iraqi War. He has traveled the world and spread word of the situation of the Iraqi people, and the significance of peaceful conflict resolution.

In 1991, after refusing to volunteer to participate in the invasion of Kuwait and organizing opposition groups, he fled Iraq and lived in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia for two years, teaching art to children. In this way Bilal became part of a generation of Iraqi artists and intellectuals who were forced into exile, where they were isolated from their heritage and current Iraqi art practices.

Wafaa Bilal (Arabic: وفاء بلال ‎ [wæfæ bɪlˤɑːlˤ] ; born June 10, 1966) is an Iraqi American artist, a former professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently an associate professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is best known for his work, Domestic Tension, a performance piece in which he lived in a gallery for a month and was shot by paintballs remotely by internet users watching from a webcam and for his book, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance under the Gun, based on that performance, which details the horrors of living in a conflict zone and growing up under Saddam Hussein's regime.