Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me opens February 1 and runs through October 19, 2025.

Indulge Me is a major survey of renowned artist Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY). Crucially, the exhibition will take a comprehensive look at Bilal’s myriad practice, highlighting the development of his work across decades and placing it in conversation with broader art histories. It will also explore cultural cannibalism—that is, how culture (specifically the culture of the other) is used, disassembled, and consumed.

Working in performance, sculpture, and with online and interactive technologies, Bilal’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the dynamic between international and interpersonal politics while highlighting the tension between the United States, which he has deemed the “comfort zone,” and the “conflict zone” of Iraq. Through methods such as using his own body to interrogate notions of power and using innovative technologies to rectify acts of cultural destruction, Bilal shows us what it means to consciously engage across cultures while highlighting negative global implications of consumption, exploitation, and profiteering.

The exhibition will be organized into five immersive sections, each of which focuses on a major work from Bilal’s practice. Artworks on display include a reconstruction of a room in Chicago’s FLATFILE Gallery that the artist confined himself to for a month-long performance in Domestic Tension (2007). During this performance, Bilal invited the audience to shoot at him with a paintball gun that was operated virtually by viewers who could also interact with him via camera feed and live chat. Over the course of thirty days, a total of 60,000 shots were fired by "shooters" from 128 countries. Also included in the MCA exhibition is a large-scale, towering video displaying images from Bilal’s year-long performance 3rdi (2010–11), wherein Bilal surgically implanted a camera into the back of his head that, every minute on the minute, captured photographs. The photos included in the MCA display will correspond to the minute, hour, and day they were taken.

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me will also present Thumbsat Satellite (2024), which comprises a golden bust of Saddam Hussein fixed to a satellite and launched into Earth’s orbit as part of the exhibition. Developed as a critique of the former Iraqi president’s rumored desire to launch a bust of himself into space, the work will also feature a number of in-gallery components, including a model of the satellite and bust and a way for visitors to track the artwork’s location through live-captured images before it is destroyed upon re-entry into the atmosphere.

Additionally, the exhibition will feature In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA, Bilal’s response to ISIS’s destruction of the Winged Bull of Nineveh sculpture, or Lamassu, in 2015. The piece involves inserting high-resolution 3D scans of the sculpture into the DNA of heirloom Iraqi wheat seeds. A commission by the MCA will see the project activated in a new, sculptural form, which will consider if it is possible for a wheat seed to transform terrorist violence into restorative agency.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication, the first to survey multiple projects by the visionary artist.

A series of exhibition-related programs will be announced closer to the opening.

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me is curated by Bana Kattan, Pamela Alper Associate Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.

Image: Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY), Rendering of Thumbsat Satellite, 2023. © Wafaa Bilal. Courtesy of the artist.