Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me
MCA Chicago
Through October 19, 2025
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago presents the exhibition Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me. This is a major survey of renowned artist WAFAA BILAL (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY). Crucially, the exhibition takes a comprehensive look at Bilal’s myriad practice, highlighting the development of his work across decades and placing it in conversation with broader art histories. It also explores cultural cannibalism—that is, how culture (specifically the culture of the other) is used, disassembled, and consumed.
Working in performance, sculpture, and with online and interactive technologies, Bilal’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the dynamic between international and interpersonal politics while highlighting the tension between the United States, which he has deemed the “comfort zone,” and the “conflict zone” of Iraq. Through methods such as using his own body to interrogate notions of power and using innovative technologies to rectify acts of cultural destruction, Wafaa Bilal shows us what it means to consciously engage across cultures while highlighting negative global implications of consumption, exploitation, and profiteering.
The exhibition is organized into five immersive sections, each of which focuses on a major work from Bilal’s practice. Artworks on display include a reconstruction of a room in Chicago’s FLATFILE Gallery that the artist confined himself to for a month-long performance in Domestic Tension (2007). During this performance, Wafaa Bilal invited the audience to shoot at him with a paintball gun that was operated virtually by viewers who could also interact with him via camera feed and live chat. Over the course of thirty days, a total of 60,000 shots were fired by "shooters" from 128 countries.
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.
Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)
Also included in the MCA exhibition is a large-scale, towering video displaying images from Bilal’s year-long performance 3rdi (2010–11), wherein Wafaa Bilal surgically implanted a camera into the back of his head that, every minute on the minute, captured photographs. The photos included in the MCA display correspond to the minute, hour, and day they were taken.
Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me also presents Thumbsat Satellite (2024), which comprises a golden bust of Saddam Hussein fixed to a satellite and launched into Earth’s orbit as part of the exhibition. Developed as a critique of the former Iraqi president’s rumored desire to launch a bust of himself into space, the work will also feature a number of in-gallery components, including a model of the satellite and bust and a way for visitors to track the artwork’s location through live-captured images before it is destroyed upon re-entry into the atmosphere.
Additionally, the exhibition features In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA, Bilal’s response to ISIS’s destruction of the Winged Bull of Nineveh sculpture, or Lamassu, in 2015. The piece involves inserting high-resolution 3D scans of the sculpture into the DNA of heirloom Iraqi wheat seeds. A commission by the MCA see the project activated in a new, sculptural form, which considers if it is possible for a wheat seed to transform terrorist violence into restorative agency.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication, the first to survey multiple projects by the visionary artist.
Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me is curated by Bana Kattan, Pamela Alper Associate Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.
Image courtesy of the artist
WAFAA BILAL (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY) is known internationally for his online performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international and interpersonal politics. Bilal's work explores tensions between the cultural spaces he occupies—his home in the “comfort zone” of the US and his consciousness in the “conflict zone” in Iraq. For his 2007 installation, Domestic Tension, Wafaa Bilal spent a month in Chicago's FLATFILE Gallery where people could shoot him via a remote-access paintball gun. The Chicago Tribune called it "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time"—naming him 2008 Artist of the Year. That same year, City Lights published Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun about Bilal's life and Domestic Tension. His work was part of the Iranian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Wafaa Bilal's work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha,
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO - MCA CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL
Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, MCA Chicago, February 1 – October 19, 2025
