Wafaa Bilal

Splicing ancient Mesopotamian civilization with post-cultural planetary futures through a poetic act of preservation, my latest work, In a Grain of Wheat, is an interdisciplinary artwork that archives the 3,000 year-old Winged Bull of Nineveh inside the DNA of Iraqi wheat seeds. By stewarding visionary developments in molecular-digital data storage through a radical creative lens, the project not only restores into global consciousness the Assyrian imperial monument, which was ravaged by iconoclastic violence from ISIS in 2015, but represents the start of a far-sighted transnational collaboration to safeguard and incubate endangered Iraqi cultural heritage through a comprehensive seed bank of bio- digital surrogates.The project begins by bridging the ruins of Mosul with the museums of Manhattan to take 3D digital scans of a sister lamassu from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and encode these into Fertile Crescent wheat seed DNA. With this, the sphinx-like lamassu – one of the ancient Near East’s most enduring iconographical symbols of blessing and protection – enters the shared evolutionary code of all living things. Drawing together the cardinal powers of art, science, and nature to chronicle global cultural memory for the citizens of tomorrow, In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA transcends archival restoration to become a pioneering performance of regenerative cultivation, offering a thrilling call to heritage consciousness for the 21st- century and beyond.

Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal is known internationally for his on-line 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, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; 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 PhD from DePauw University. Bilal is currently an Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.