Shot More Than 40,000 Times, an Iraqi Artist Spreads a Message with a Paintball Gun

When Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal decided to sequester himself in a Chicago art gallery for 42 days with a paintball gun that people could aim and fire at him over the Internet, he thought he might get a few shots per day. He never guessed that by day 20, more than 40,000 shots would be fired and that hackers would program the gun to fire automatically.

His exhibit, "Domestic Tension," shows the constant stress and fear under which his family and others in Iraq live. And it highlights the detached, remote way both the American public and soldiers experience modern warfare.

"To the Western media it's a virtual war going on in Iraq -- we're far removed in the comfort zone," he says. "We're allowed to disengage from the consequences of war. We don't see mutilated bodies, we don't see the toll on human beings."

It is unclear how well he has conveyed his first point.

It is chilling how well he has conveyed the second.

To judge from the blog and chatroom posts on various websites that have linked to his website, the majority of people who took shots at Bilal as they watched him over a live Webcam seemed either oblivious or hostile to his antiwar message. The bulk of the more than 62,000 people from at least 128 countries who took aim were apparently video-game and paintball junkies, intrigued by the possibility of shooting someone hundreds of miles away with a click of their mouse.

"They'd say, 'This has nothing to do with politics. I just wanted to see if I could fire from Minnesota and hit someone in Chicago,'•" he says. "It was much different on opening night [which was a] very playful atmosphere. I wanted to draw people in by doing something playful. But then when all the people left, the shooting continued."

After two and a half weeks of confinement in a simulated bedroom/office in FlatFile Galleries, Bilal was suffering ear and chest pain, sleep deprivation and overall stress from the constant ear-shattering blast of the gas-powered paintball gun, which he has maxed out his credit cards to supply with new balls.

The 40-year-old professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is no stranger to physical hardship and political tension. In Iraq, he was arrested as a dissident under Saddam Hussein's regime. Because a member of his family had been accused of disloyalty to the regime, he was not allowed to study art at the university. When Hussein demanded "volunteers" to attack Kuwait, Bilal infuriated officials by refusing. He began organizing with opposition groups and spending time with dissident artists who painted anti-authoritarian calligraphy on walls at night.

"There was so much fear, you couldn't even talk to your brother or sister -- the saying was that the walls had ears," he says. "You could make a simple joke and end up disappeared and tortured. There were a lot of people fighting the regime, but it was so brutal it didn't make any difference. A whole village could be disappeared."

Bilal fled Iraq in 1991 and spent two years in a Saudi refugee camp. There, he scrapped together supplies to paint and teach children art in a studio he built out of adobe with a plastic-sheeting window.

"We realized we weren't going to leave any time soon," he says. "We were given tents to live in, and the desert has no mercy when storms come."

In late 1992, Bilal came to the United States and studied art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he lived until moving to Chicago. In 2005, his 21-year-old brother, whom Bilal describes as "apolitical," was killed by shrapnel as he stepped outside the family's home in Najaf. Soon after, Bilal's father died. It was then the idea for "Domestic Tension," which he originally considered calling "Shoot an Iraqi," began to brew. (He later decided that name would be too incendiary.) A news story about a U.S. soldier sitting in Colorado firing missiles in Iraq cemented his desire to showcase the technological, remote aspect of modern war. He said his family thinks he's "crazy."