"Shoot an Iraqi" Artist to visit SF

raqi artist Wafaa Bilal will be will be reading at City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, March 11th. An artist and professor of Photography and Imaging at NYU, Bilal received wide recognition for his interactive performance piece, "Domestic Tension," on NPR, the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, The National, and elsewhere. For one month, he lived alone in a cell-sized room where a remote-controlled paintball gun made it possible for a virtual audience to fire at him 24 hours a day. He was awarded the Chicago Tribune’s Artist of the Year Award for his work on the project.

In his latest instillation, Bilal turns his own body – in a 24-hour live performance – into a canvas, his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink, seemingly invisible unless under black light. During the performance, people from all walks of life read off the names of the dead.

Bilal's book, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, was published by City Lights.