Wafaa Bilal

Wafaa Bilal -

Quote:
Wafaa said in relation to his Domestic Tension project that he was trying to “highlight the dehumanizing effect on the human. ”  I liked this from a conceptual stand point.  Often times people talk about video games having a negative effect on kids and leading them to do violent acts.  Wafaa explained  that by placing himself in the game  people started to take sides with him and would actually pull the gun in directions away from him to keep him from getting shot.

Something New I Learned:
Wafaa definitely had experienced a lot of pain in his life.  He had lost is brother and father and lived in a constant state of fear.  It really helps me to understand  his work to learn that.

Themes in Wafaa’s work:
Political, Cultural. Religion, Human Interaction

Thoughts:
Wafaa was  very clearly spoken about his projects.  I came away with a much better understanding of what he was trying to convey.  Most of his work had a element of self-inflicted pain.   Through this pain and performances the audience was introduced to the ideas of what he had struggled through by being an Iraqi. He described his themes in projects such as Domestic Tension  as ‘conflict zone vs. comfort zone, aesthetic please vs. aesthetic pain, virtual platform vs. physical platform.’  The idea of virtual reality vs reality is something that I feel not many people have touched on.  I don’t think I wouldn’t instantly assume his project Domestic Tension was real if I had come across the site.   But after watching or playing it for awhile I surely would.

What I found to be most compelling in Wafaa’s work:
I’ve pretty much only talked about his one series of work so far and it is probably my favorite:  “Domestic Tension.”  Wafaa placed himself in a  real world setting for a month where people could log on and shoot him with paintball guns.  Paintballs certainly are really painful and I can’t imagine being shot at 24/7 like it was at some points  during his project.  It was the little stories that he told about this project that really that made me enjoy what he was doing.   He said there was one person logged in at one point that kept shooting him over and over.  He looked at the camera and said, “you can keep shooting. I’m going to eat my sandwich.” At that point the person realized it wasn’t just a game and felt guilty, stopping his shooting.  In this way he probably changed someones outlook completely on the situation.  I think it’s every artists goal to reach people and Wafaa certainly does a good job of it.

My Questions:
You seem to surround and place yourself in painful situations with a desire to make people more aware of the situations around the world, how is this more influential than  reporting on reality?   To rephrase, how does the artist have  a bigger impact than the media?  I think that Wafaa showed us that he was able to  bond with people on a very personal level.  With his interactive setups people where able to engage and talk with him personally.  The best example is the group that  was protecting him from getting shot in ‘Domestic Tension.’

2.  In your series  “One Chair” you have a computer program that makes the video interact with live subjects.  To me this is  a very strong way to communicate with large numbers of people, especially since with the addition of people things change to a great degree.  Do you have any plans to take this project further?  This wasn’t specifically addressed.   He didn’t even talk about this project, however, I think I can see a clear progression in his work.  It all tends to focus on politics and human interaction.  So in a way he never stopped working on  “One Chair,” he just followed a progression onto newer, but stylistically similar, works.