Across Histories - Artist Talk: Wafaa Bilal

Wafaa Bilal’s artistic practice explores the artist's body as a medium for connecting the comfort zone in the USA to the conflict zone in Iraq and other strategies of engagement such as aesthetic pleasure vs. aesthetic pain. In this talk, Bilal will discuss his acclaimed 2007 piece Domestic Tension, where he confined himself in a gallery space facing a robotic paintball gun which people could fire at him over the internet, 24 hours a day for 31 days. Bilal will also address the use of the Internet as an artistic platform as well as the censorship his show Virtual Jihadi faced in New York by Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute and the city of Troy.

Posted by ArteEast www.arteeast.org.
Reviewed/approved by Talieh Shahrokhi.