During Wafaa Bilal’s childhood in Kufa, Iraq, his parents held one rule above all others: Do not, under any circumstances, talk about the regime.
The young artist and his friends wondered if the walls had ears. So, they devised a workaround. They would gather at the middle of the intersection in their neighborhood, tell each other the latest joke about Saddam Hussein’s government, then dash away.
Bilal, 59, now thinks of those meetups as an “underground comedy club.”
“We understood how to deal with oppression through laughter,” he said. “That was a form of empowerment.”
The traveling standup show “Amreeka” is a grown-up version of that club. Curated by Bilal, the show features a rotating roster of comics opining about “Amreeka” — a playful reference to how “America” is pronounced by some in the Arabic-speaking diaspora and elsewhere.
It started as a monthly series in New York, where Bilal lives and works as a professor at New York University. On Friday, it comes to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which is currently hosting “Indulge Me,” Bilal’s first major art retrospective.
It’s fitting that “Indulge Me” and “Amreeka” will both roost here, in the city that most shaped his practice.
Bilal arrived in the U.S. in 1992, after two years of living in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. A month after he arrived in Chicago in 2001 to pursue an MFA at the School of the Art Institute, the 9/11 attacks stunned the world.
In Bilal’s recollection, the school went from an “apolitical conceptual art school” to “political” almost overnight.
“Then it dawned on me,” he said, “that I was at the epicenter of this political storm.”
Bilal describes his art from those early years as “antagonizing.” His 2001 video installation titled “Al Qaeda R Us” confronted viewers with images of American military valor juxtaposed against the bloody human toll of those campaigns.
“The very people who contributed to the demise of my homeland were so oblivious to what happened,” he said. “So, automatically, the work was pointing fingers at them, implicating them in the destruction of my life.”
He credits his time at SAIC as redirecting him from didactic art toward an ethos of radical, even provocative, interactivity. He went on to become an adjunct professor there before getting hired by NYU in 2008.
Bilal’s change in approach was also shaped by a personal tragedy. His brother Haji was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2004; their father, heartbroken, died shortly thereafter.
Those losses — as well as a TV interview with an operator of an American drone, like the one that likely killed Haji — inspired Bilal to stage his most famous work, “Domestic Tension” in 2007.
For a month, Bilal lived in a makeshift room in the former FlatFile Gallery in the West Loop, while remote strangers could choose to shoot him — or not — with a web-operated paintball gun. He streamed the carnage in real-time, 24/7, via live cam.
Bilal wanted to name the project “Shoot an Iraqi.” The gallery talked him out of it.
Since then, Bilal has pursued other daredevil experiments that push political satire to grim extremes. Between 2010 and 2011, Bilal surgically implanted a livestream camera in the back of his head as commentary on state surveillance; he had to end the project after a year when the scalp area became infected.
Another project — a hacked video game he called “Virtual Jihadi,” which visitors can play for themselves in “Indulge Me” — was shut down almost immediately upon its display at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute outside Albany, New York, in 2008.
