Wafaa Bilal

 Wafaa Bilal-Domestic Tension

Topic: Wafaa Bilal
Student name: Chan Yik Fei
Student number: 60169927

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In today’s blog, we are going to explore Wafaa Bilal’s interactive installation named “Domestic Tension” made in 2007 in response to the Iraq war.


Let’s start with the artist himself. Wafaa Bilal is born in Iraq and grew up during a rough history of Iraq. He faced many problems in his path of becoming an artist, from being prohibited from studying art and being arrested as a dissident under the government’s tight regime. Then, Wafaa fled to Saudi Arabia and taught art to young kids there for two years. Later, he came to the U.S.  to finally study art at the University of New Mexico.


In the work, Domestic Tension, it’s not about family members arguing or topic regarding familial violence as I had thought. Instead, Wafaa brought tension into the house by setting up a viewer controlled pain-ball gun inside a room with a live stream. Very literally tension inside a home, but the tension came from viewers sitting behind monitors, who may shoot him at any time and whim. This is to reflect how the military soldiers can shoot missiles behind a monitor as well, missiles that killed his people and family


Personally, I think this exhibition shows how easily one can choose to kill if given the means, the room covered in paint makes me doubt the morality of humans. It shows that we are no better than those soldiers who kill many without a second thought through a button, we are no better than those we call “mass murderers” and “monsters”. Especially when insults were thrown as Wafaa was accused of dodging, is it not cruel to force a victim to not dodge for survival? This exhibition, to me serves as a cruel reminder how heartless and inhumane humans and war can be.

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