EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Wafaa Bilal
Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born artist internationally recognized for his online, performative, and interactive works that implicate audiences in the politics of conflict and spectatorship. His practice examines the tension between the relative comfort of his life in the United States and a consciousness that remains deeply tied to Iraq. Using his own body as a contested site, Bilal explores violence, participation, displacement, and the politics of representation.
In his landmark 2007 installation Domestic Tension, Bilal spent a month in FlatFile Galleries while online participants controlled a remote-access paintball gun aimed at him. The Chicago Tribune described the work as “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time,” naming him 2007 Artist of the Year. In 2008, City Lights published Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, which reflects on Bilal’s life and the making of Domestic Tension.
Following Domestic Tension, Bilal continued his exploration of war, surveillance, and media culture through projects such as Virtual Jihadi, a controversial interactive work that examined the politics of gaming, violence, and representation in the context of the Iraq War. The project generated international debate and further established Bilal as a leading voice in politically engaged new media art.
Bilal has continued to implicate audiences through projects such as 3rdi, in which a camera was surgically implanted in the back of his head to transmit a continuous image of the space behind him, and ...and Counting, a durational performance in which his back was tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq and the names of Iraqi and American war dead. His work Canto III was included in the Iranian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and his ongoing project 168:01 raises awareness of cultural destruction while fostering collective healing through education and audience participation.
In 2025, Bilal presented Indulge Me at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, a major exhibition further expanding his exploration of power, spectatorship, and the politics of participation. That same year, he was named Artist of the Year by ARTnews.
Bilal’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, among others. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received an honorary PhD from DePauw University. He is currently Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
