Tattooing Death - One Iraqi Artist Uses His Body as a Canvas

Numbers and statistics sometimes have the ability to numb me. When I read a body count – let’s say the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died since the U.S-led invasion began in 2003 – I can mentally register the tragedy of it, but it’s hard to feel the emotional outrage of such an impersonal figure. This is precisely the numbing effect that one Iraqi artist wanted to address in a piece of “interactive art” performed in front of a live audience in New York City in early March.

“Interactive” art is not really the most accurate way of describing Wafaa Bilal’s art. On March 8-9, he used his body as a canvas, with a borderless map of Iraq tattooed onto his body in a 24-hour live performance. He got the names of various Iraqi cities and towns tattooed on his back with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty inked near the city where they fell.

But that’s not all – the 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by permanent red dots and the 100,000 dead Iraqis (although the actual figure is likely higher than that) are represented by green dots of UV “invisible” ink. During the actual tattooing, the names of dead Iraqis were read aloud on a microphone.

In a video by Grit TV, you can see the process unfold and watch the “invisible” dots of Iraqis deaths light up under a black light. On Bilal’s website, you can read more about this project as well as others including “Shoot an Iraqi” – a one-month interactive performance-piece where the artist lived alone in a small room “in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to internet viewers around the world. Visitors to the gallery and a virtual audience that grew by the thousands could shoot at him 24 hours a day.”

Bilal’s brother was killed by a missile at a U.S. checkpoint in 2004, and as the artist writes on his website, he “feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who’ve lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public.”

Sometimes I don’t always feel the intended impact of such extreme works of interactive or performance art, but in Bilal’s case, the intensity of his pieces is an honest representation of the intensity of his subjects, something you don’t often encounter when reading about the effects of the war on the Iraqi people.