Wafaa Bilal
New York, NY
Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born American artist whose practice stems from the extreme tensions between the cultural spaces he occupies—his home in the comfort zone of the US, and his heart in the conflict zone of Iraq. He is known internationally for his provocative, performative and interactive works exploring international and interpersonal politics post-conflict. The 2007 installation, Domestic Tension, informally titled Shoot an Iraqi, archived such friction head-on: occupying a “bedroom” containing a robotic paintball-gun in Chicago’s west-loop Flatfile Gallery, he invited audiences to shoot at him over the internet. The Chicago Tribune called it “one of the sharpest works of political art in a long time,” naming him Artist of the Year. His work is in the permanent collections of LACMA and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography; international collectors include Qatar’s Arab Museum of Modern Art. Bilal is an Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Events
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Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me
Feb 01, 2025–Aug 17, 2025
Illustration of the colonial excavation of the Winged Bull of Nineveh in 1847, inspiring Wafaa Bilal’s In a Grain of Wheat.
Still from a 2015 ISIS propaganda video showing a member of the iconoclastic militant group wielding a jackhammer to chisel off the face of a nine-ton lamassu, a human-headed winged bull monument built in the 8th century B.C. to guard the Nergal Gate of the Assyrian city-state of Nineveh. Photo credit: Balkis Press, SIPA, Associated Press.
The skinless or “skeleton” rendering of a 3D scan of the Assyrian winged bull lamassu from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shown floating in a nonspecific and untethered digital environment.
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 3D scan of the lamassu sculpture after photographic image mapping, a process which pixelates the digital code to render the object’s surface texture or “skin,” as well as delineate the specific axis gridlines of the digital environment.
An artist’s impression of binary code/digital data stored in the double helix of a DNA molecule, merging the cool precision of science with the mysticism of the hybrid unknown. Credit: Shutterstock/ymgerman.
Anticipated outcome of Wafaa Bilal’s In a Grain of Wheat. Bright green kernels of (data-written) grains, still in their husks, scaffold the flowering spike of a single ear of wheat — each ripening under the sun into a tiny fruit containing the edible – and readable – seed.
In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA
Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born American artist whose practice stems from the extreme tensions between the cultural spaces he occupies—his home in the comfort zone of the US, and his heart in the conflict zone of Iraq.
Artist BioIn 2015, ISIS destroyed the Winged Bull of Nineveh, or lamassu, a 2,700 year-old Mesopotamian protective monument. Using leading-edge molecular biological archiving processes, Wafaa Bilal saves high-resolution 3D-scans of the sculpture inside the DNA of heirloom Iraqi wheat seeds, integrating the origins of civilization with postcultural planetary futures. Digital assets of the artwork, including the scanned data and cellular organisms, will be accessible for researchers, scholars, curators, and students, while the data-written wheat seeds will be preserved in seed banks. Site-specific installations of encoded wheat seeds, planted and grown, will celebrate the raw power of nature working creatively with humanity across the millennia.