Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me @ MCA Chicago - Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me 

MCA Chicago 

Through October 19, 2025

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

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. 

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

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.

WAFAA BILAL

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

mcachicago.org

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, MCA Chicago, February 1 – October 19, 2025

Lotus L. Kang @ 52 Walker, New York - "Already" Exhibition

Lotus L. Kang: Already

52 Walker, New York

April 11 – June 7, 2025

LOTUS L. KANG 

Documentation, '49 Echoes', 2025

© Lotus L. Kang, courtesy of the artist; 52 Walker, New York; 

Franz Kaka, Toronto; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles

52 Walker presents its fifteenth exhibition, Already, featuring work by Canadian-born, New York–based artist LOTUS L. KANG. Kang’s multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, photography, and installation, often reflecting on ideas of impermanence, inheritance, memory, and time. In her iterative presentations, Lotus L. Kang realizes these thematic concerns by transforming materials like photographic paper and film whose light-sensitive surfaces implicate traces of surrounding architecture and bodies. At 52 Walker, the artist brings together a selection of discrete objects, wall works, and an installation staged within and around two greenhouses.

The exhibition title Already draws from an eponymous poem by Kim Hyesoon—one of forty-nine from her book Autobiography of Death (2019), which considers the Buddhist tradition of after-death rituals performed for forty-nine days during the intermediate period spanning death and rebirth.

Two modified greenhouses, respectively titled Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes I and II), prominently mirror each other across the infrastructural pillars bisecting the gallery. Regularly utilized by Lotus L. Kang in outdoor environments as a process tool for exposing photographic film from her series Molt, the greenhouses at 52 Walker have been brought indoors, here envisioned as permeable, metabolic environments. Works titled Mesoderm punctuate the gallery walls, serving as abstracted indexes of Kang’s ongoing research and fixations, culled from her archive of found and taken photographs or from memory. To accompany the exhibition, the gallery presents a formative work from Kang’s recent Azaleas series that functions like the underbelly to Already. Azaleas II is titled after a 1925 poem by Korean modernist Kim Sowol (1902–1934). This kinetic sculpture comprises an enlarged rotary film dryer and a diaphanous length of 35 mm film depicting purple orchids that tautly wraps around its metal skeleton; the machine is placed atop a low, tatami-like base strewn with objects that reverberate within the artist’s orbit. The sculpture rotates according to a score that combines the syllabic meter of Sowol’s “Azaleas” alongside Kim Hyesoon’s “Already.”

LOTUS L. KANG was born in Toronto in 1985. She received a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2008, and an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York, in 2015. 

Lotus L. Kang has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. In 2023, she presented In Cascades, a major traveling solo exhibition co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Further solo presentations have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2024); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2023, 2020, 2017); Helena Anrather, New York (2021); Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2019); Interstate Projects, New York (2018); and Raster Gallery, Warsaw (2015), among others. Kang has also been included in several significant group exhibitions. Her installation In Cascades (2023) was featured in Even Better Than the Real Thing, the 2024 iteration of the Whitney Biennial.

Lotus L. Kang lives and works in New York. She is represented by Franz Kaka, Toronto, and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

Lotus L. Kang: Already is curated by Ebony L. Haynes and presented by 52 Walker.

52 WALKER GALLERY, NEW YORK

52 Walker Street, New York City

www.52walker.com

Terence Koh @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - Starting Now

Terence Koh: Starting Now

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

May 19 – June 30, 2023

Terence Koh

© Terence Koh, courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery

for

the next

 few 

 ears

 eye

  will

dedicate my life too a single body of work

no piece will bee larger than the size of the

  human heart

       each work is created using my natural

                                                         almost blindeyesight

ev e r  y

dot, line, gesture

breath thought

mome n  t

sings

god

                                              all is framed by me

                   starting now my life has    t o o    bee          transformed

terence koh

24 dec '22

lost angels

Terence Koh was born in 1977 in Beijing, China and grew up in Mississauga, Canada. He received his Bachelor degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. He is currently living in New York City.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote @ Library of Congress, Washington DC

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote
Library of Congress, Washington DC
June 4 - September 2020

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote

© Library of Congress, Washington DC

Handwritten letters, speeches, photographs and scrapbooks, created by American suffragists who persisted for more than 70 years to win voting rights for women, are featured in a new exhibition at the Library of Congress. “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” tells the story of the largest reform movement in American history with documents and artifacts from the women who changed political history 100 years ago.

Drawing from the personal collections of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriet Stanton Blatch and others, along with the records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and National Woman’s Party – all donated to the national library years ago – the exhibition explores women’s long struggle for equality. “Shall Not Be Denied” will trace the movement from before the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, through the divergent political strategies and internal divisions the suffragists overcame, the parades and pickets they orchestrated for voting rights, and the legacy of the 19th Amendment that was finally ratified in 1920.

“As institutions in Washington and across the country mark the centennial of women’s suffrage, now is a great time to learn more about women’s history. At the Library of Congress, we are so thrilled to share this new exhibition at this moment of national reflection,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “Through the personal collections of many extraordinary women who helped shape this country, you will get a more intimate view into the struggles, the rivalries and ultimately the triumphs of this 70-year movement.”  

The exhibition is part of a yearlong initiative in 2019 inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers. It will explore the stories of dozens of diverse women who shaped the suffrage movement and made history.

Highlights of the exhibition include marquee records, images, music, merchandise, cartoons and ephemera of the movement. Key items include:  

- Abigail Adams’s letter from 1799 refusing to consign women to an inferior status;

- A rare printed version of the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a listing of demands Elizabeth Cady Stanton read to more than 300 at Seneca Falls, and the proceedings of a larger national women’s rights meeting two years later in Worcester, Massachusetts, that drew more than 1,000 suffrage supporters;

- A sculpture of Susan B. Anthony (portrait bust) that she hoped would one day be displayed in the Library of Congress, now on loan for the first time from the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument;

- An original broadside of the Declaration of Rights for Women that suffragists distributed in Philadelphia in 1876, disrupting the nation’s centennial celebration when Anthony presented the declaration on stage to acting Vice President Thomas Ferry;

- A draft manuscript of Stanton’s controversial and best-selling “The Woman’s Bible” that paired Biblical text with feminist commentary;

- Suffrage sheet music and merchandise used to “sell” the idea of suffrage;

- Images and film footage of political activity on the streets, including the first national parade for suffrage in 1913 in Washington, D.C., which exposed racial divides in the movement and was disrupted by an unruly mob;

- Banners, pins and a cap and cape worn by suffragists during parades and demonstrations;

- Photographs of early picketing at the White House and documentation of suffragists’ subsequent arrests, imprisonment and force feeding;

- Carrie Chapman Catt’s Ratification Notebook with notes on her strategy to win ratification of the 19th Amendment in each state; and

- An interactive display on suffragists who helped win the vote state by state.

“Shall Not Be Denied” is part of the national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, marking major milestones in 2019 and 2020. The exhibition opens on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Senate’s passage of the suffrage amendment that would become the 19th Amendment once it was ratified by three-quarters of the states on Aug. 26, 1920.

An online crowdsourcing campaign to transcribe documents within the Library’s unique suffrage-related collections to make them more searchable and accessible will be ongoing during the exhibition. For more information go to the By the People website: crowd.loc.gov.

“Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” is made possible by the Library of Congress James Madison Council, with additional support from 1st Financial Bank USA, Democracy Fund, Thomas V. Girardi, AARP, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation, HISTORY® and Roger and Julie Baskes.

The Library is inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers through a series of exhibitions, events and programs. Exhibitions drawing from the Library’s collections will also explore Rosa Parks’ groundbreaking role in civil rights history and artists’ responses to major issues of the day. Other events throughout 2019 will explore changemakers through music, performances and public programs. 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
101 Independence Ave., SE - Washington, D.C. 20540
www.loc.gov

Michaela Zimmer, Peter Welz @ Fold Gallery, London

Michaela Zimmer, Peter Welz: After White
Fold Gallery, London
2 February - 10 March 2018

Michaela Zimmer, Peter Welz: After White

Courtesy Fold Gallery, London

Fold Gallery presents After White a collaborative show comprising painting, sculptural intervention and performance.

There is a physical awareness of spatial conditions that is as much the origin as it is the content of Michaela Zimmer’s work. While her paintings strive to resolve issues of corporeal energy in a visceral sense, her collaboration with dance is based on a mutual understanding of physical expression. Elements of performance are utilized to construct her work; continuous painted lines, applied in one stroke, with dashes and reflections that often produce multiple layers and make up a surface that is fluid but also precise. Designating the studio as a site of private ritual, Michaela Zimmer is known for layered compositions on canvas coupling the traditions of painting and drawing with unconventional materials.

In After White Michaela Zimmer has invited Peter Welz, who for this collaboration, has designed a hybrid between an architectural device and a sculpture. The architectural structure divides the gallery in a manner that references modernism, not only presenting an obstacle, but also a means for the structure to interact with the painting. Sometimes the structure cuts into a view of a painting – sometimes it acts as a strut to support one. Peter Welz and Michaela Zimmer invite the viewer to walk around and interact physically with the paintings and structure, to view them from different angles; in a sense choreographing the movement of the viewer, making them become a performative part of the work.

Peter Welz’s interest in motion and architecture started from his first collaboration with choreographer William Forsythe for the installation Retranslation | Final Unfinished Portrait (Francis Bacon), presented at the Musée du Louvre in Paris in 2005. In this work the human body harmonizes, intersects and inserts itself perfectly into the piece as a gestural expression - an interaction with body and object is continued and expanded upon for After White.

On the opening night Miguel Altunaga will perform the next version of labo(rat)ori, an ongoing performance project between Michaela Zimmer and Miguel Altunaga who is a member of the Rambert dance company. For the first time Miguel Altunaga will not only act as choreographer but will also perform the solo.

Sarah Rosengarten, an artist working with textures and textile, joins the team by creating the costume for Altunaga’s performance.

FOLD Gallery
158 New Cavendish Street, London, W1W 6YW
www.foldgallery.com