The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Holiday clips: Wafaa Bilal

December 26, 2025·54 min·5 clips

Wafaa Bilal describes how a paintball performance helped him finally grieve his brother's death.

The weekend format looks back. Green introduces the conversation as a favorite from the previous year, centered on Wafaa Bilal and the MCA Chicago survey Indulge Me. He sets up Bilal as an Iraqi-American artist whose performances, sculptures, and digital presentations deal with United States conduct in Iraq, the Middle East, and geopolitics. The survey's frame gets more interesting once the conversation turns to Bana Katan's reading of the work. Bilal says he had not fully understood his practice through cannibalism before. Green lingers on the catalog essay, and Bilal credits Katan with pulling different works together under an idea: the viewer consumes the body, and one culture consumes another. He connects that reading to projects named in the excerpt, including Shooting Iraqi, the third eye, Dog or Iraqi, and Accounting. The biographical section stays plainspoken. Bilal recalls leaving home after opposing the Kuwait war and refusing to volunteer for the army under Saddam's regime. He describes a life with no images recorded. Being watched as an Iraqi, Muslim, and Arab becomes part of the work, not just its backdrop. Photography turns into a question of power. Bilal talks about returning the gaze, then removing the index and the eye so the camera can make images without his direct control. The final image is quiet: a black Lamassu moving forward while wheat grain leaks from one hoof. Loss is there, but so is the idea of Iraqi culture continuing.

As heard by us

Wafaa Bilal turns surveillance, exile, and the artist's body into a sharp conversation about cultural survival.

This holiday clips episode returns to Tyler Green's conversation with Wafaa Bilal, pegged to the MCA Chicago survey Indulge Me. Green frames Bilal's work as a career-spanning argument about Iraq, the United States, geopolitics, and cultural cannibalism, while Bilal pushes the…

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Press play if you want art talk that treats geopolitics as material, not slogan.

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