A year and a half ago, Wafaa Bilal made himself one of Chicago’s best-known artists when he shut himself in a room at Flatfile Galleries in front of a paintball gun. The gun could be controlled remotely, over the Internet, and Web surfers and gallery visitors alike could aim and fire it, blasting Bilal with yellow paint. By the end of the project, titled Domestic Tension, more than 60,000 people had shot at him from more than 130 countries, and he had been featured in media outlets from NPR to Newsweek.
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He was also a wreck. Even a year after the project’s end, Bilal has not recovered from the stress caused by the incessant explosions of the gun and the strain of constantly trying to avoid impact. “I am tormented by it on a daily basis; I still cannot sleep more than two to four hours a day,” he told me recently. “Some time ago I said I would give all the fame for just one good night’s sleep. If I knew what I know now I don’t think I would have done it.”
Bilal had worried that the life experience would overwhelm Domestic Tension, and it’s true that some of the transitions are jarring, as when the story lurches from a banal wedding party held in the gallery to Saddam’s declaration of war on Iran in 1980. But the point of the book, and of the project, is at least partly to create such unsettling juxtapositions. “We exist in a comfort zone,” Bilal says, “and we forget about a war taking place somewhere else.”
Tue 11/11, 7 PM, Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone, experimentalstation.org.
Thu 11/13, 7 PM, Flatfile, 217 N. Carpenter, 312-491-1190 or flatfilegalleries.com.
Fri 11/14, 6 PM, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbus Auditorium, 280 S Columbus, 312-443-7277.
Sat 11/15, 8:30 PM, No Exit Cafe, 6970 N. Glenwood, 773-743-3355 or heartlandcafe.com/nx_index.
