What I’m building right now is the hardware and the software for the project, starting on May 4th. I will live in the gallery for a month, I have people helping me from the Art and Technology department, so I have a team. We are building software that will enable you to go on the Internet, and then have control over the gun and the camera at the same time.  And people will have the ability to move the gun and then a trigger to shoot.

It is, and I don’t know what it’s going to do to me. Since it’s hard for me to go to Iraq and see what people are going through. I want physically to put myself in that position, to be close to that. I don’t know how long I will take it and whether I will be able to go through with it.

Do you try to manifest that kind of violence on your body in this piece?

What I’m doing with this piece is, after I move and everything, I’m going to paint everything purely white. It has to do also with the imposed value from one culture on to another. And then the paintballs, I decided not to make them red, but instead yellow.

Well, yellow, subliminally, I wanted to deliver something. If you think of it, yellow represents support the troops. I don’t want to have anything to do with violence. Red is very violent. That’s one thing I’ve been recently addressing in my work, is the negotiation between the aesthetic pleasure versus aesthetic pain.  And with political art it becomes harder and harder to communicate to viewers, because a lot of political art tends to alienate the viewers. What I’m doing with this project, and other projects, is, I want to deliver something, so there is a value of the aesthetic in the piece, but then also the content. But if you want to separate the two, maybe the service of the project is aesthetic, but then the content is delivered to you slowly, instead of hitting you at the beginning, which tends to alienate the viewer, especially when the viewer is far removed from the conflict itself. If you represent the violence in Iraq through painters, for example, it’s acceptable. Why? Because they’re in the middle of it. They understand it.  But, their audience in this country is far removed from any conflict.  How to deliver the content to them is tricky.

So, you started making art in Iraq. I saw also that you had a geology degree...

That was not by choice, but by design. Early on, I knew what I wanted to do. All these years prepared me to go to the College of Art, which at that point was one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. That was the dream, to finish high school and go there. You had to take a test to enter the school. I took the test and the professor congratulated me for making it, and he said, “When school starts just come and you will start school here.” And it was to my surprise when I got rejected. I visited one of the professors at school and he said, “It has nothing to do with us, it has everything to do with the government.” The government has a security office of intelligence at every school, and I talked to them and I learned that I wasn’t accepted because of political reasons. My cousin was executed a year or two earlier. 

So, instead of going to art school, which Saddam’s government viewed as a powerful medium to communicate with people, I was sent to study geology and geography. During these years I stayed in school but produced artwork, and as a consequence I got arrested a few times, and the last year was the biggest challenge, because I openly challenged the government and refused to go to the Kuwait war. And I knew that if I stayed there I would be captured by the government. So I made a run for it, and it took me from Baghdad to Najaf, from Najaf to Kuwait, and from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia, two years in a refugee camp, then from Saudi Arabia to the United States.

All what I did in the past, in Iraq, in the camp, was painting. When I moved to New Mexico, at UNM, I started in the painting department, but for a few reasons, one of them the lack of support for political art at UNM. I saw the limitation of painting, in terms of generating impact. Painting has a powerful ability to render reality and give a narrative ready for consumption, intellectual consumption, but what it lacks is the impact on the body, in terms that we understand this is a rendering of reality, and not reality itself. But with video and photography there is a different language perhaps, our mind doesn’t understand it but our body does.  With video, there is the conceptual part, which the brain deals with. Then there is the corporal language, and the body doesn’t understand, since it’s a moving image, it thinks it exists in the present, and that’s how you generate a larger impact on the viewer. And photography, in a way, is working the same way, because the body is not re-rendered, because we associate it as part of reality, and it’s just captured somehow.

Absolutely, that’s something you can see very clearly in the relation between painting and photography in my work. If you think about what photographers do these days, it’s very much what painters did earlier, because we are re-rendering reality through technology. As I said, painting is a powerful medium, because the painter has the ability to re-render anything. Photography lacked that until the nineties, until technology allowed the photographer to re-render reality to the extent of painting. So photographers, today, they are the painters of our time.

So, for you, video installation, photography even, and this new project all seem to emphasize the experiential.  You’re almost asking the viewer to complete the work.

Do you think there is a lack of political art, especially about the war?

In the nineties, I was one of the few people who was willing to tackle this issue of war, embargo, genocide. There was big opposition to what I wanted to do. I remember when I applied to the Art Institute for the MFA program, many people said, “First of all, they’re not going to take you, and second, the Art Institute is far removed from any political art.” And as time progressed, and people have gotten more and more serious about what is happening in terms of foreign politics, I see more artists doing political art. But also, I see the population opening up to it. In the nineties, during the war, and also during the ten years of embargo against Iraq, people were even more far removed from the battleground. Now, I think people are more engaged, because we have more people, American young soldiers, dying in Iraq, and you see the effect first-hand in this country, and I think you see more and more artists involved, because they have an open ear from the audience engage in such a dialogue.

There are so many people saying, “Art has nothing to do with politics, and art should be about nothing.”  It’s impossible. Art by nature is politics. When we render reality into any form of art, we are either amplifying the situation in order to allow other people to pay attention.  Or we are amplifying it in order to oppose  the situation. Art, by nature, and artists by nature, are the outsiders in society.  They always like to change things, they’re not satisfied with the status quo.  But I think we also have responsibilities now. I personally cannot detach myself from the war. One, it also has to do, of course, with who I am and where I come from.  Of course I’m an Iraqi.  But of course I’m an American as well. My family is affected there. It’s like the motherland is at war with the adopted land.

I was about ten or fourteen when Saddam came to power.  I saw how at the beginning how the rhetoric was. It was all about the security, it was all about the people. But as we progressed, people lost all power, and it became a police state. I’m just afraid this might happen in the Untied States. That’s why I’m fighting with all my power to stop it, to stop the government scaring people to death. I think before the last election, people were still terrified about what terrorists might do to us, and the rhetoric from the government. But people overcame this fear, and they did overcome this fear in the last election. They said, “No, we don’t believe this rhetoric anymore. We are going forward and we are asking for change.”

Sometimes it seems that we’re strangely seeing the same identity of what we say we’re opposing in our own very own government.

Exactly. That’s what you see, the community in Chicago is getting smaller. There’s still a community, though, and I still meet with other artists. It’s surprising to me that people enlist, and also the extent that the military goes to do this. It has a lot to do with money as well. Because the military and the contractors are getting a lot out of this too. Yes, they’re paying Iraqis, but how much are they getting? In this war from the beginning, it was the lack of leadership and corruption, on both sides. Not only on the American side, but on the Iraqi side as well. You see that common people don’t even have their basic needs met. Why does a family only have two hours of electricity, when Iraq is making 50 billion dollars a year now? Where is all that money going? 1.5 billion barrels a day. And it has so much to do with corruption. In fact, since we’re in Chicago, the Electricity Minister was in Baghdad. And he was accused of stealing 3 billion dollars in one year. He was imprisoned in the Green Zone by the Iraqis, because it was safe. Then, somehow the soldiers freed him. And he is living in Chicago right now. The American military freed him. It makes you wonder, what is the connection here? It’s strange how it’s parallel to what Saddam was doing. He was always at war, because war gives one man ultimate control. We surrender everything, because it has to with our existence, our protection in life. As a citizen, what can you do when you’re faced with such a propaganda machine, and such real violence. Why have we spent a trillion dollars since the war?

Think how much that would have improved life in the United States in terms of health care and education. And where did all that money go? Not to the Iraqis, not to the Americans. It went to very few companies; Blackwater, that’s the biggest company. And then Halliburton, we don’t even need to mention, because it’s out there. I just learned that they moved their headquarters to the United Arab Emirates. And that’s why I believe the U.S. is not going to leave Iraq anytime soon.

I talked to my brother yesterday and people describe the base in Ballad, Iraq is the biggest United States base in the area. They’re not going to pack it up. That’s one thing about the war, is that the country stays de-stabilized, and Iraqi people think that is by design.  As long as you keep Iraq de-stabilized, the Iraqi government will need the United States’ help.

I don’t think the goal is democracy. These are the slogans to sell it. It’s all about control. Iraq, if you think about it, has nothing to do with September 11th. The United States was the one to put Saddam in power. We were fighting him when Rumsfeld himself visited him, shaking his hand in Baghdad. It’s using an unfortunate situation, and taking advantage of it. If you think of the location, Iraq has the second largest known oil reserve. But it also has to with the location in relation with China, as well, so strategically, Iraq was an ultimate place to capture. That’s why the United States is not going to move out of the country.

WB.

I worked on a piece called Midwest Olympia, and when you look at Midwest Olympia, the last image you think it is an image of war. When I said it’s about war, people were kind of surprised. Because what I’m saying here is that the war seen in a mirror. When you dry the resources from a population, we’re creating individuals who are disengaging from dialogue, and we are creating isolated individuals. When you look at that image, it has so much to do with consumption. We create a void inside of us, and that void will be filled with the promise of happiness, which is the object. The promise is, that as much you consume, the happier you get. In fact, it’s not true. It’s a void, it’ll never be filled. It’s a one-hour shot of a person in a very domestic place, opening their place to us. I wanted to see that, I wanted to show the effect of aggression going inward, and that’s using the same analogy as Jeff Wall and his destroyed room, the very early piece. It’s a still photograph. That’s the idea I’m playing with, is the sign value. It has everything to do with having an open narrative on the surface, then we come and impose our own narrative on the piece. That’s why when you sit in a room with Ms. Midwest Olympia, after a while it becomes about you, about your life. It offers you a meditative state, which a lot of works of art don’t offer you. Painting does, and I’m trying to do the same thing with video. Not like life, where everything is fast-moving. I wanted to slow reality down, and that’s why you see 400 years of video, trying to give the space for give people to think and meditate and reflect inside, and just impose their narrative on the artwork.

That’s a very different take on the normal way of thinking about videos, as opposed to the passive registration of images by the viewer.

Exactly. But that piece, Midwest Olympia, is unlike other interactive pieces, because other interactive pieces, takes the input of the viewer.  But this one has no viewer. It is linear; it has a beginning and an end. It’s a slice of life, one hour and 62 minutes, an unedited take. You have the space to face somebody you don’t know, in a very, very private situation, and you’re just facing that. And after a while you see all the objects occupying the space, and you cannot help reflecting on your life.

^Thanks to Sarah Cameron for valuable sound help.