Contemporary Art: Progressive or pointless?
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Wafaa Bilal
Artist; professor, Tisch School at New York University
Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born artist known for provocative, interactive works that blend technology with personal history to confront war, political narratives and cultural erasure. His acclaimed “Domestic Tension” (2007) earned Chicago Tribune praise as “one of the sharpest works of political art in a long time” and inspired his memoir “Shoot an Iraqi.” Other landmark projects include “3rdi,” “… and Counting,” “Canto III” (Venice Biennale 2015) and “168:01,” a global initiative to rebuild libraries lost to war. Named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers (2016), Bilal received the Creative Capital Award in 2021 for “In a Grain of Wheat.” His first major retrospective, “Indulge Me,” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2025. Bilal holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was conferred an honorary Ph.D. from DePauw University. Bilal is currently an arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
