Talk

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal.

Bilal is renowned for provoking dialogue about international politics and internal dynamics through high-profile, technologically driven art projects that employ the use of robotics, the Internet and photographic mobile mapping. For his 2007 installation Domestic Tension, Bilal spent a month in a Chicago gallery with a paintball gun that people could shoot him with over the Internet. Bilal's work is constantly informed by the experience of fleeing his homeland and existing simultaneously in two worlds: his home in the "comfort zone" of the U.S. and his consciousness of the "conflict zone" in Iraq. Often using his own body as a medium, Bilal continues to challenge our comfort zones with projects like 3rdi, and Counting..., The Things I Could Tell and his most recent participatory installation, 168:01. He is currently an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.