The Ashes Series
The Ashes series depicts the suffering of war not through human displays of emotion, but rather through the absence of human life in once occupied homes. It investigates the impact of the destruction of these private, domestic spaces in war and media images of such destruction. These intimate spaces are literally ripped open and become public through external violence and the act of destruction. The images exist in the aftermath of atrocity, with the presence of the human spirit represented only by the monochromatic whiteness of the ashes. These images also serve as mirrors to my desire to return home to Iraq when this is not possible, as well as to explore the duality of my life as a former Iraqi refugee and as an Arab American between two clashing worlds. Reconstructing the destroyed spaces provides a way for me to exist within them and, in a sense, to rebuild the places in Iraq where my brother and father were killed. As an artist I constantly negotiate between the expression of aesthetic pleasure, which is necessary to seduce the eye, and conveying the aesthetic pain of destruction. The Ashes Series represents my attempt to make sense of destruction and to preserve the moment of serenity after the dust has settled: to give the ephemeral moment extended life in a mix of beauty and violence.Wafaa Bilal
Biography : Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal, an Associate Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, is known internationally for his on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international politics and internal dynamics. For his 2007 installation, Domestic Tension, Bilal spent a month in a Chicago gallery with a paintball gun that people could shoot at him over the Internet. The Chicago Tribune called it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him 2008 Artist of the Year. Bilal’s work is constantly informed by the experience of fleeing his homeland and existing simultaneously in two worlds – his home in the “comfort zone” of the U.S. and his consciousness of the “conflict zone” in Iraq. Using his own body as a medium, Bilal continued to challenge our comfort zone with projects like 3rdi and …and Counting. Bilal’s most recent body of work, Canto III, premiered in a solo booth at the New York Armory Show in 2015 and went on to be shown in the 2015 Venice Biennale.
In 2008 City Lights published “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun,” about Bilal’s life and the Domestic Tension project. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
His work can be found in the permanent 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, Qatar; amongst others.
