The art of war

Wafaa Bilal, Virtual Jihadi, 2008.

The last time he had a show at FLATFILEgalleries in the West Loop, Wafaa Bilal was shot at approximately 60,000 times. In his twice-censored project Virtual Jihadi, which appears in FLATFILE’s “Freedom of Speech” exhibition beginning Friday 20, Bilal does the shooting himself.

The Iraqi-born, Chicago-based 42-year-old intended his 2007 FLATFILE installation, Domestic Tension, to convey what it’s like for Iraqi citizens—including his own family—to live amid never-ending violence. Bilal (who has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2004) created a website that allowed viewers to chat with him or click to blast him with a paintball gun as he spent a month living at the gallery, recorded by a webcam day and night.

According to FLATFILE, the website received 80 million hits from around the world. Bilal received a few hundred direct hits himself; yellow paint drenched his temporary bedroom. From his online conversations, Bilal learned that many of his assailants were video-game junkies who admitted their detachment from him made it easy to shoot.

Technology’s ability to dehumanize a so-called enemy was one inspiration for Virtual Jihadi, which Bilal first presented in March during a residency at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. Bilal created Virtual Jihadi by inserting himself into the Al Qaeda video game Night of Bush Capturing. In Bilal’s hacked version, his character is an Iraqi who becomes a suicide bomber after his brother dies in the war—and who tries to blow up President George W. Bush.

Virtual Jihadi has one correspondence with real life: In 2005, Bilal’s brother was killed by shrapnel in Najaf. But the artist insists his project does not advocate terrorism or assassination. He wants viewers to understand why grief, fear and political chaos have made Iraqis susceptible to propaganda like Night of Bush Capturing.

Such nuances were lost on RPI’s administration. The school shut down Virtual Jihadi the day after Bilal unveiled the project and refused to let it reopen, citing the concern that the piece “is derived from the product of a terrorist organization.” Bilal points out that Night of Bush Capturing is a “mod” of the American video game Quest for Saddam, which encourages players to kill stereotypical Iraqi soldiers before taking out Saddam Hussein.

A few days later, Bilal reinstalled Virtual Jihadi at the Troy-based Sanctuary for Independent Media, where the game was on view for one day before the city government shut down the gallery, citing “code violations.” (Troy’s Republican public works commissioner, Robert Mirch, who oversees code enforcement, led a protest of Virtual Jihadi outside the gallery before shuttering it.)

Bilal and the Sanctuary are now suing the city of Troy, with help from the New York Civil Liberties Union. In the meantime, the artist keeps trying to bring home the horrors of the war: In March, he planned to blow up a mud brick home he built last summer at the Montalvo Arts Center in California to evoke similar structures inhabited by rural Iraqis. (The arts center balked at such realism.) And in April, he was waterboarded as part of Dog or Iraqi, a project organized by a member of the activist group the Yes Men that invited viewers to vote whether to subject Bilal or a pug named Buddy to the torture technique. They chose Bilal, who recalls that he “only lasted seven seconds” because the simulated drowning was so terrifying. He adds that the ROTC members at RPI who performed the waterboarding seemed equally disturbed.

When asked whether courting controversy has any benefits—the incidents in Troy brought Bilal (whom New York University has just hired as an assistant photography professor) national media attention—the artist acknowledges that he deliberately pushes the envelope in his work. Yet he adds, “I knew [Virtual Jihadi] was going to be controversial, but I didn’t know it was going to be that controversial.”

“Freedom of Speech” opens Friday 20.