Wafaa Bilal's MCA Chicago survey confronts violence, surveillance, and cultural destruction through radical performance

Wafaa Bilal’s exhibition 'Indulge Me' at MCA Chicago, curated by Bana Kattan, runs until October 19. One standout piece is a replica of his 2007 performance 'Domestic Tension', where he was shot with paintballs 65,000 times in a month by online participants from 128 countries, garnering 80 million views. This work was a response to the 2004 missile strike in Iraq that took his brother Haji’s life, emphasizing the disconnection in remote warfare. Another significant piece, 'Virtual Jihadi' (2008), features Bilal as a suicide bomber in a banned Al Qaeda video game, which eventually showed at The Sanctuary for Independent Media despite protests. His work also includes '3rdi' (2010–11), where a camera implanted in his head streams images every minute, and 'In a Grain of Wheat', which embeds 3D scan data of the destroyed Winged Bull of Nineveh into Iraqi wheat seeds, created in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum. Through his art, Bilal explores cultural issues, empathy, and complicity, encouraging active participation instead of mere intellectual debate.