The Brooklyn Rail

Through his interdisciplinary practice, Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal has been exploring for the past two decades what he refers to as “cultural cannibalism.” The artist’s first major institutional exhibition, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, brings together sculptural and interactive works as well as archival displays of performance pieces that address how the culture of the other can be appropriated, consumed, and weaponized. The manifestations of this cultural cannibalism are varied, including displays of power by Saddam Hussein, the US government, and ISIS fighters. Viewed cumulatively, the works certainly reveal a shared understanding by very different parties of the potential of culture to convey political supremacy and domination. However, bringing these distinct examples together under the umbrella of cultural cannibalism risks muddying the waters and flattening the complex power dynamics and shifting hierarchies that shape each specific context.

Bilal has repeatedly used his own body, often in painful ways, to interrogate his position as an Iraqi navigating life in the occupying power. In 2010, he surgically implanted a camera into the back of his head that captured minute by minute details of his life for a year. 3rdi (2010–11), a performance of “self-cannibalization,” is projected on a 14 foot screen, a magnification of the minutiae of the everyday. We are drawn in, feeling awkwardly voyeuristic.

The incessant process of documentation, one that often manifests in physical pain as the camera causes inflammation or infection, reveals the tensions shaping Bilal’s existence in America. As a refugee, he is driven by desire to record, to remember even the most banal details in an attempt to compensate for a past erased, and create some sense of permanence. However, by exposing himself to this level of scrutiny, by making his private domestic space public, Bilal gestures to the panoptic surveillance experienced by Arabs and Muslims in the decades following 9/11.

Similarly, Bilal put himself on exhibit in an earlier durational performance, Domestic Tension (2007), by moving into a Chicago gallery space and live-streaming his every move for a month. Again, the safety of the private sphere was shattered as viewers were able to tune into the feed and fire a paintball machine at will. On exhibit here is a replica of the sparsely furnished room Bilal inhabited for thirty-one days, splattered with yellow and red paint from sixty-thousand shots that were fired at the artist, as well as three of the daily video-logs he kept documenting the challenges of the performance. The quiet, haunting tension of this chaotic set is disrupted by the bright, cheerfulness of the paint. Produced in response to the news of his brother’s murder by a missile in 2004, Domestic Tension (2007) encouraged the eighty million viewers who participated from more than a hundred countries to consider their remove from the violence being enacted remotely. Intended as a commentary on “the state-sanctioned violence inflicted” on Iraqis, what is perhaps most interesting about Domestic Tension (2007) are the questions it raises about inviting audiences take part in virtual violence and how their participation is then understood.

Bilal has often used games as a strategy in his practice, a means by which to engage audiences and highlight their participation in and beyond the exhibition while underscoring the oft-blurred line between the playful and the political. Gaming, especially role-playing video games, has been an important weapon in the war on terror with participants conscripted as virtual combatants. Virtual Jihadi (2008) invites visitors into a four-station internet cafe, somewhere in the Arab world, to play a video game with Bilal as its main protagonist. The game’s mutation from the 2003 Quest for Saddam to an Al Qaeda version called The Night of Bush Capturing highlights the malleability of the same tools to serve differing political agendas. To these versions, Bilal adds his own, appropriating the game and redirecting its purpose.

In a new commission, Lamassu (In a Grain of Wheat) (2025), Bilal attempts to redress the erasure of Iraqi heritage. In response to ISIS’s destruction of cultural monuments and artifacts across the country in 2014 and 2015, the artist collaborated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a 3D scan of a lamassu sculpture from their collection. The human-headed winged lion once guarded the doorway of an Assyrian palace, before being looted in 1840 and eventually ending up at the Metropolitan, a gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr. The majestic ebony reproduction stands vigilantly in the center of the gallery, its gaze arresting the viewer. At its front hoof lies a pile of wheat, each grain containing the digitized and compressed data of the 3D scan embedded in its DNA, an archive that can be disseminated amongst museum visitors. There is a quiet and yet unexamined irony to Lamassu (In a Grain of Wheat) (2025), to the parallels and continuities it reveals. Colonial looting, the historic foundation of significant portions of Western museum collections, still finds an enthusiastic market, a fact of which smugglers both during the 2003 invasion and the ISIS occupation a decade later were acutely aware. Moreover, while the archiving of sculpture’s data in the wheat grains guarantees its survival and dispersal in the face of such contemporary threats, the collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art leaves the museum’s expansive dominance over the preservation of stolen histories largely unquestioned.

It is of course impossible to experience Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me as separate from the current political moment, or to avoid making some rather grim comparisons with this latest phase in the United States’s forever wars in the Middle East. Twenty months of genocide in Gaza have been accompanied by Israeli strikes on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Meanwhile, Islamophobia is alive and well, with government officials warning the public of the threat of Iranian sleeper cells, and elected representatives calling for the denaturalization of Muslim Americans. Since the early 2000s, exhibitions of art from the Middle East have been used to humanize the other, the artist acting as the ultimate foil to the terrorist. However, the continued timeliness of Bilal’s work raises questions about the effectiveness of this strategy and the cultural cannibalism at play in the artworld itself.