“Rendering of Canto III,” 2023. (Image courtesy of the artist)
Wafaa Bilal: Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture
Wafaa Bilal will deliver the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal 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 U.S. and his consciousness in the conflict zone in Iraq. For his 2007 installation, “Domestic Tension,” Bilal spent a month in FlatFile Galleries 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 year, City Lights published “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun” about Bilal’s life and “Domestic Tension.” Using his own body as a medium, Bilal continued to challenge the public’s comfort zone with projects like “3rdi” and “and Counting….” Bilal’s work, “Canto III,” was included as part of the Iranian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Bilal’s current work, “168:01” brings awareness to cultural destruction and promotes the collective healing process through education and audience participation. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; amongst others. He 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 doctorate from DePauw University. Bilal is a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.