[iDC] Wafaa Bilal: Speech in a Democracy

Sun Mar 9 15:59:12 UTC 2008

Why am I not surprised by this story?

Check out this in the Guardian from yesterday.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2263424,00.html

It concerns the (lack of) response in the US to three films that seek to
critique the war in Iraq. One of the filmmakers, Brian de Palma, has
apparently been threatened and, as you will read in the article, some are
demanding he is stripped of his US citizenship for being a traitor.
Astounding right wing rhetoric, but it is in the mainstream of US culture,
not on its rabid margins. Sick place. Mind you, it is little better here
with the UK government pushing ahead with its anti-immigration agenda
unimpeded.

Regards

Simon

On 9/3/08 00:35, "brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr" <brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> Hello everyone -
> 
> Here is some more "strange culture." Happening in a university near you.
> Solidarity appreciated.
> 
> all the best, Brian
> 
> ***********
> 
> Wafaa Bilal: Speech in a Democracy
> 
> Wafaa Bilal is currently an artist-in-residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic
> Institute in the city of Troy, New York. Shortly after his arrival on March
> 5, his exhibition in the gallery of the Arts department was closed to the
> public by order of the university¹s president. Today there is no certainty
> that the exhibition will be reopened. What I want to show is that every
> aspect of Wafaa Bilal¹s visit to RPI points back to one fundamental issue:
> the value of free speech in a democracy.
> 
> Bilal was born in Iraq in 1966. He resisted the authoritarian government of
> Saddam Hussein, suffered persecution and then escaped the country,
> emigrating to the US in the early 1990s to realize a lifelong dream. He
> completed an MFA at the Chicago Art Institute in 2003  and then, due to
> circumstances far beyond his own choosing, he became one of the most
> controversial artists in America.
> 
> He works with photography, video and computer games, using the Internet to
> reach beyond the gallery to a wider public. At the heart of his recent
> pieces is a single principle: he performs the existence of an Iraqi
> civilian. He shows us, tells us and tries to make us feel what life might
> be like right now, for those he left behind in his home country. By staging
> himself in interactive situations, he asks each of us to chose what we have
> to say to the Iraqi people.
> 
> Let¹s remember that Iraqis are not necessarily our enemies. US armed forces
> originally came to liberate them from a dictator. This apparently simple
> premise has given rise to a terribly complex dilemma. An occupying power,
> claiming to restore democracy to a foreign nation, is faced with deadly
> attacks on its forces and with the parallel development of civil wars
> linked inextricably to its presence. A civilian population, which had no
> voice and no chance to intervene in any of the events leading up to this
> violence, is faced with explosives, assassinations, cross-fire, penury,
> immeasurable suffering and death. By the most cautious and thoroughly
> documented account available, the liberation of Iraq has been accompanied
> by 81,632 civilian deaths by violence since March 20, 2003 (cf.
> www.iraqbodycount.org). Each of those who have died, including Bilal's own
> brother, is a unique human being, just like each of the 3,974 Americans who
> have died in he war. The question that arises today is whether the citizens
> of the United States  who, through our elected representatives, did
> collectively decide to engage in violence  can still speak in public about
> the consequences of that decision.
> 
> What does it mean to speak in public? It¹s no longer so easy as standing on
> a soapbox. We live in an intensely mediated society. Every day,
> politicians, journalists, newscasters, movies, recruiting officers,
> brochures, posters, blogs and games "speak" about the war. They raise
> feelings of the widest variety: fear, revulsion, hatred, pride, a sense of
> strength or courage, sadness, horror, anxiety. Amid all these emotions, one
> overriding concern is constantly at issue: our relation, as a listening and
> viewing public, to the image of American servicemen and women faced with a
> strange, seemingly unknowable enemy. That one issue conditions every
> political decision made about the war. Yet those whom we came to liberate 
> not our enemies, but the Iraqi people  are strangely absent from this
> discussion. As if in reality, we wished to know nothing about them.
> 
> Wafaa Bilal is now a US citizen. He uses his rights as a citizen to speak
> to us symbolically, with photographs, videos, websites, interactive games.
> He insists that symbolic speech has its consequences. One of his recent
> pieces was entitled ³Domestic Tension: Shoot an Iraqi² (2007). He designed
> an interactive website allowing anyone, anywhere, 24 hours a day, to aim a
> paintball gun inside a gallery and fire it at him. With this work he
> addressed the American public. The participants chose their responses. They
> could speak with bullets, by firing paintballs at a supposed enemy; or they
> could respond in any other way, with words, with letters, with emotions,
> with recognition and respect, with solidarity for another human being. Some
> of them found that if they "spoke" just right, by a click just in time,
> they could divert the paintball which another participant was firing
> directly at the artist.
> 
> Bilal came to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a video game: "The
> Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi." Here, the situation is complex,
> like the war itself. Bilal¹s piece is based on the video game "Quest for
> Saddam," where American gamers were invited to attack and kill stereotyped
> Iraqi enemies during a mission to capture the dictator. This commercial
> game was hacked by individuals claiming to be part of Al Qaeda. They
> transformed it into a game where Islamist warriors seek to kill the
> American president. Then they offered it to people in Iraq, just as the
> original game had been offered to young Americans. Bilal hacked the hack,
> and placed his own image in the game. He let himself be symbolically
> absorbed within it, the way any teenager would be absorbed during the time
> of play. And he then made this situation public, as the central element of
> his exhibition at RPI.
> 
> There is vital meaning in this act of symbolic speech. The artist is trying
> to inform you, not only about the ways that a video game pictures Iraqis
> for the American public, but also about the ways that Al Qaeda speaks
> through games to Iraqi youth. With the image of his own body, Wafaa Bilal
> is trying to tell everyone about the consequences of war and hatred, and
> the kinds of symbolic speech that are circulating in the world beyond our
> borders.
> 
> Wafaa still has one project going at RPI: and you can partiipate, at
> www.dogoriraqi.com. He wants your vote to decide which one -- a dog named
> "Buddy," or an Iraqi, himself -- will be waterboarded at an "undisclosed
> location" in upstate New York.
> 
> Are Iraqis our enemies? Should we vote for torture? Is free speech the
> essence of a democracy? Would you pull the trigger? To ask these dangerous
> questions through symbolic speech, without physical harm to anyone, is a
> possibility that art can give us. To make use of that possibility, and
> thereby to keep democracy vividly alive, is to fulfill one's civic
> responsibility. This kind of challenging and open debate is what we could
> expect in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a great university. Yet precisely
> that has been denied, with the closing of the exhibition "Virtual Jihadi"
> at Rensselaer Polytechnic. Exercise your right of expression. Write to
> President Shirley Jackson in favor of re-opening the show (email:
> president at rpi.edu). Free speech is now severely threatened. But what we
> need today, at a minimum, is to ask many more public questions about the
> reasons for remaining involved in this war.
> 
> Brian Holmes
> 
> 
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Simon Biggs

Research Professor in Art
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
http://www.eca.ac.uk/

simon at littlepig.org.uk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk

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