Via B. Blagojevi? for ArtCal “Iraqi American video artist Wafaa Bilal’s recent exhibition at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, Virtual Jihadi, was closed by the University’s administration a day after its initial opening on 5 March 2008.
A conservative commentator on the state payroll called for protests to Bilal’s exhibition before its opening in the pages of the Troy Record, citing a work based on an incendiary video game exhibited in a university art gallery.
The offending work, a video in which Bilal depicts himself as an Iraqi civilian radicalized by his brother’s death and driven to join an Al-Qaidea in Iraq cell as a suicide bomber, positions the artist’s character in an interactive video game called The Night of Bush Capturing, an Islamist détournement of Hunt for Saddam, an American first person shooter in which a protagonist U.S. soldier makes his way through a virtual world populated by stereotypical Iraqi men in an Odyssean journey to “hunt” and kill former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. RPI cited concerns that Balil’s work may make use of university resources to ‘provide a platform for what may be a product of a terrorist organization or which suggests violence directed toward the president of the United States and his family.’
Following the censoring of the exhibition at the university art gallery, Balil seems to have been blacklisted from campus and denied access to university buidlings, despite being RPI’s current artist in residence and being assured by the university president that he remains a welcome member of the community regardless of the recent controversy. Balil describes this and more in a recent video interview.”
To view the rest of the article please visit ArtCal
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RPI is supposed to be so damn progressive too. Lame.
I think this is a great testament of how art causes reaction. Unfortunately, it is an example of how defensively people behave when someone/something asks a shift in perspective or to question what we hear in the news every single day. But still, people are paying attention…
I wonder what the whole story was here. I’d be interested to see more of the art, was it thoughtful and provocative or was it simply intentionally offensive?