REVIEW: Modern Myths: “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY), Rendering of Canto III, 2024. © Wafaa Bilal, courtesy of the artist.
REVIEW
Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
220 E. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60611
August 2, 2025 – January 5, 2026
By Nicky Ni
When the MCA postponed the career-spanning show Indulge Me by Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal for a whole year, some hearsay from my gossip network suggested that it was due to the postponement of a rocket launch. The work in question is Canto III (2015), a response the artist made to a rumor he heard: Saddam Hussein's political party, the Ba'athists, wanted to launch gold busts of the leader to outer space and directly above Baghdad, so the busts, like a satellite, would forever orbit around Earth and be “watching” Iraq. The installation of Canto III further conceptualizes the materialization of this “crazy” space Saddam project, but with a satirical twist. It imagines sending a miniature bust, equipped with a selfie cam, to just below the orbit: close enough that it would send live feed for a year or so before burning into dust by gravity, but not enough to be granted eternity in space (albeit comically as a piece of space junk).
The Ba’athists’ project was never realized, nor did Bilal’s miniature make it to space. But I wasn’t surprised when unverified intel suggested that the daredevil artist had sought options to tag the sculpture to some commercial rocket launch. After all, it’s not like artists haven’t done it before. Trevor Paglen did it; recently Eduardo Kac did it too. But there’s something strangely poetic about an imaginary project that stems from a rumor and becomes the subject of gossip for a show. It shrouds itself with irresistible myths that point to alternative realities, where what could have happened becomes the focus of interest.
Similar tactics are noticeable in Lamassu (In a Grain of Wheat, 2025), an MCA-commissioned project that presents a 3D-printed sculpture that replicates a lamassu from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and pouring from one of its front hooves are wheat grains bioengineered to have their DNA encoded with that scan data. Viewers can pick up a few seeds and keep them. The grain’s potential to sprout and pass down the modified genes turns itself into a biological archive for art prone to politicized destruction; it’s an activist reaction to ISIS’s streamed obliteration of ancient Assyrian sculptures in 2015.
Above: Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025. Photo: Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman). Below slideshow: Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq), Rendering of the Lamassu (In a Grain of Wheat) sculpture. Photo: Dhemerae K Ford. Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025. Photo: Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman).
I picked up three grains from my visit and kept them in my wallet, wondering if I would really grow them into proper wheat plants, let alone having the means to extract that 3D-scan data from its DNA and print a sculpture out of it. Bilal’s Lamassu project reminds me of Iranian Kurdish artist Morehshin Allahyari's Material Speculation (2015-16), for which the artist reconstructed and 3D-printed 12 selected statues known to have been destroyed by ISIS, including a lamassu. Each of the statuettes, miniature in size compared to their originals, is 3D-printed in translucent plastic with a flash drive sealed inside that stores all the artifact’s information. Material Speculation is representative of a broader initiative that Allahyari spearheaded with artist and writer Daniel Rourke, titled the 3D Additivist Manifesto. The duo considers a radical embrace of 3D printing technology that has the capacity of “condensing imagination within material reality.” Both Bilal and Allahyari take advantage of technology, metaphorically speaking, to build material platforms for the viewers to conceptually latch onto in order to speculate even more. However, in both cases, what are originally invisible and allegedly preserved—data of the Met’s lamassu in Bilal’s grains or that of destroyed artifacts in Allahyari’s flash drives—remain invisible and inaccessible to a regular visitor within the museum setting. We come to these artworks that conceptually indulge us as emerging myths, and we remain observers.
Above: Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY), Domestic Tension, 2007. © Wafaa Bilal, courtesy of the artist. Below slideshow: Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025. Photo: Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman).
On the other hand, I find Bilal’s earlier and more performative works a lot more relatable. By involving his own body, the artist effortlessly leverages what’s most personal to him to the maximum of what can be communicated as a universal, shared experience. You almost don’t need to know that he is an Iraqi or learn all the horror he’s gone through to understand what he sees, to feel his work, his pain. And what’s most political sits right at the middle, in front of your face, like an elephant in the room, so blatantly visible that you don’t notice its presence anymore.
Take Domestic Tension (2007), for instance. Bilal did this seminal performance, almost exactly seventeen years ago (that year’s Memorial Day marked Day 24 of the performance), at a former gallery space called FlatFiles, located in Chicago’s West Loop, where he lived in one of the gallery room for a whole month as a target for anyone in the world who wished to shoot him via an internet-connected paintball gun. Over the course of thirty-one days, some 650,000 shots were fired, coating the walls in yellow paint so thick that, according to gallery owner Susan Aurinko, the walls could never be painted white again.
In another piece, 3rdi (2010-11), Bilal surgically attached a camera to the back of his head and carried it for over a year. The camera captured snapshots of the artist's surroundings, and what's on view at the museum—back-projected onto a tilted screen as though it were going to fall onto the seated viewer—is a series of still images, synchronized to the minute to Chicago's local time. A lot of images are murky or blurry, possibly due to obstruction or movement. But occasionally, you get a nice crisp view of outside the window, knowing that the artist was looking the other way.
At that moment, Bilal never saw what we see, and we imagine that when he was reviewing his work, it would also be the first time for him to see all the images that "he left behind."
Bilal's performances can be compared to Taiwanese-born artist Tehching Hsieh's One Year series. Both offer the kind of shock value based on the endurance and suffering of the artist's body. It is a strategy that the artist uses their own body as a vessel to communicate empathy, taking on a kind of social responsibility to address injustice that oftentimes falls into invisibility, because those who endure only have the option to internalize.
But you can’t really get a visceral sense of the meat of the performance from the installed room of Domestic Tension on view at MCA, which is a replica. Incorporating ephemera from the performance, the three-wall mise-en-scène is staged to uncanny perfection that it doesn’t immerse the viewer.
Image left: Wafaa Bilal. Image courtesy of the artist.
It demarcates its boundary, like the three pieces of plexiglas, some framed, others not, that are suspended in the air, marking where a door or window would be, through which you see the austere bedroom splattered in yellow paint. Some time into the performance, Bilal started to use a human-sized plexiglass as a shield to protect himself from nonstop firing. When the plexiglass broke, he replaced it when he could. The installation at MCA, with its pristine messiness, assumes a very mannered posture. It possesses a kind of aesthetic of a removed spectacle, reminiscent of Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s famed multi-room installation Artichoke Underground that imagines the living and working quarters of a fictional magazine, and Gian Maria Tosatti’s post-pandemic takeover of the Italian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Bienale, with the installation History of Night and Destiny of Comets that evokes the eerie of a humanless factory. You walk into or around the installation as though you were walking inside a computer game that emits a real fakeness.
Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY), Virtual Jihadi (still), 2008.© Wafaa Bilal, courtesy of the artist.
On the contrary, Bilal’s daily vlogs, from which videos from select days are compiled into a loop that plays from an adjacent wall, have the power not to shock but to connect. (The entire video playlist is available on his website.) When Bilal was performing Domestic Tension, he uploaded a short video every day to recap what had happened. His emotional ups and downs are vividly encapsulated in these videos. Regularly wearing goggles as he spoke, he would always thank people who participated and state that he had no resentment against those who fired the gun. The graininess and shakiness of these videos are less an imprint of authenticity than a testimony of how our relationship with the internet and its connectivity has soured over the past couple of decades. I wonder how Domestic Tension would look like in the year 2025, how it would have to mobilize social media as a means to garner viral interest, and what a live enactment of a first-person shooter game entails within today’s technological conditions, where our understanding of what’s real is constantly being reconfigured.
First-person shooter games rose in popularity in the early 90s. In 2003, at the peak of the U.S. anti-terrorist paranoia and coinciding the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq, an Islamophobic first-person shooter game The Quest for Saddam was released. Three years later, an Al-Qaeda version of the same game emerged as The Night of Bush Capturing, with only the game’s texture altered to replace Saddam with George W. Bush. Five years later, in 2008, Bilal released a third version of the game, inserting a character that shares his likeness as a suicide bomber. The game, Virtual Jihadi, can be played in the show’s makeshift internet cafe, stationed with bulky vintage Dell desktop computers (vintage as in early 2000s, and one of them conveniently out of order, a tongue-in-cheek nod to how common it was for an internet cafe to have broken computers). “Half of you here probably don’t even know what the internet cafe is,” Bilal wittily addressed the audience at his conversation with the show’s curator Bana Kattan this February.
I tried to play the game during the visit. With Arabic songs playing loudly in my headset, I walked around the low-poly game scene, analyzing the surroundings while watching out for NPC soldiers. I didn’t die; nor was I constantly killing people. I was able to make it through some levels but got stuck in others, where I would walk around like a ghost, with no exit. Above me, fluorescent tubes flicker a depressingly cold, bright light, addressing other non-interactive props, such as a dirty mini fridge stocked with Arabic Pepsi, a faded Persian rug, and a lone clock high on the opposite wall synced to local time.
Imane Ayissi, Mbeuk Idourrou collection, Paris, France. Autumn/Winter collection, 2019 Photo by Fabrice Malard / Courtesy of Imane Ayissi. Credit: Africa Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023.
Bilal is no-nonsense when he talks. He has this extraordinary ability that sometimes naturally, other times stubbornly blends art and life into a mysterious emulsion, leaving open the opportunity for myth-making. He churns the atrocities he’s lived through into featherlight tales and peppers them with humor. In the same artist talk, Bilal recounted the bumpy journey of getting the camera installed to the back of his head for 3rdi. “We have consulted many surgeons,” he said, “and their answer, what was really remarkable, was that ‘We can’t do it because of the insurance.’” Bilal continued after the audience interrupted with laughter, saying that when he was in New York City getting ready for the surgery, but his surgeon got cold feet, he needed to travel to the West Coast immediately to pursue plan B. “Okay, so I am standing on Houston and Broadway, five o'clock in the evening, trying to make it to JFK on a flight to Los Angeles. If you are from New York, try take Uber, forget about it; train, forget about it. And I find a cab. And I said, ‘Habibi, [audience laughed] okay, so I have to make it to the thing within an hour.’ … ‘What if I pay you four times?’ [another laugh] We jumped into the cab, and we made it! We made it to the airport within an hour and a half. And there's another problem: the line was so long. My assistant at the time, Christine O'Heron, said to me, ‘Look what I got.’ She somehow had these pink bunny ears, and she put them on her head, and we [jumped] through the line. ‘We're getting married in Vegas! ‘We're getting married in Vegas!’”
And with more laughter, the rest is history.
Nicky Ni is a Chinese expat lurking in Chicago. She writes and curates with a special interest in time-based arts. She works as an assistant editor at Newcity and a distribution assistant at Video Data Bank. Her writing appears regularly in the Chicago Reader, Portable Gray, Cine-File, and Sixty Inches From Center. She is a festival programmer for Onion City Film Festival and a selection committee member for the London Short Film Festival.
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