Surveilling Wafaa Bilal

“Indulge Me” at MCA Chicago is the art we need to see to see how wild we are

SL & I were at MCA with a friend over the weekend for a performance of Miguel Gutierrez’ "Super Nothing" (searing / intense dance performance that turns the lights on you). Then we went upstairs to see Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me (full set of photos) which knocked me sideways and reminded me of the multi-step slow-motion absurdities our culture has taken to get us closer and closer to a never-ending circle of doing and watching at the same time.

We are wild. And by “we,” I mean you— us— and Bilal gives waypoints on how we got here.

Here’s how the MCA describes the exhibit:

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me is the first major survey of internationally renowned artist Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY). Working in performance, sculpture, and with online and interactive technologies, Bilal’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the dynamic between international and interpersonal politics while highlighting the tension between his home in the United States, which he has deemed the “comfort zone,” and the “conflict zone” of Iraq. The exhibition covers the breadth of Bilal’s versatile career by exploring his performance practice, the use of power in Saddam Hussein’s regime, and Iraqi history and antiquity. It will feature archival displays of his iconic month-long performance “Domestic Tension” (2007) and year-long performance “3rdi” (2010–11), as well as two new works including a sculptural commission for the MCA.

The mental and physical centerpiece of the exhibit is a reproduction of the room where he performed “Domestic Tension” in 2007. Designed as a response to the killing of his brother, Haaji, in Iraq by a US drone strike, Bilal lived in Chicago's FlatFile Gallery for a month during which viewers were able to remotely fire at him with a paintball gun. For 31 days, viewers were granted 24-hour access to a live feed, which allowed them to track his movements and fire the paintball gun at will.

Here’s the set for the performance:

Eighty million visitors logged on from 138 countries to watch, chat with, and shoot at Bilal. The gun was fired 65,000 times. We are wild.

The other piece that moved me was “In a Grain of Wheat” (2023-25), a large-scale reproduction of an Assyrian winged bull with a human face, known as a lamassu.

Bilal created it in response to the destruction of a lamassu by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2015. I vividly remember this day, and wrote about it at the time (“On Jesus, ISIL, and Brokenness”). Bilal’s answer is to use how wild we are to encode culture into grain that can’t be broken:

In response to this violent act, Bilal and a team of collaborators developed “In a Grain of Wheat.” To make “In a Grain of Wheat,” Bilal first partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a meticulous 3D scan of a lamassu sculpture in their collection. Next, using revolutionary data science and bio-engineering, he and his team digitized and compressed the scan data and encoded it into the DNA of a strain of wheat. In doing so, Bilal created a safe archive for the lamassu image while providing a mechanism for it to be propagated and cultivated.

No one can watch or kill us all. We are wild and we are powerful. Remember: keep making, and doing, and we win.