Teatri di guerra domestica : l’Iraq, il Terrore, l’Arte e la Rete nelle performance e installazioni di Wafaa Bilal

The essay focuses on the Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal and his performances recreating war scenarios, from the Gulf Wars to the War on Terror, in art galleries in the US and other comfort zones. Starting from Iraqi House (2007), where war breaks into the domestic environment, to his most famous performances, like Domestic Tension (2007), with the artist as target for remote-control audience/ players, …and Counting (2010), in which the artist’s body is turned into a canvas dotted with visible and invisible victims, and 3rdi (2011), where a camera implanted on the artist’s head becomes the symbol of a forgotten past that could not be recorded a documented, Bilal explores issues like the shifty thresholds dividing war and safe spaces; the use and abuse of technology and the media, the overrepresentation and subsequent invisibility of war, its materiality and abstractness, and the role war has gained in the practices of everyday, consumers’ lives.