Wafaa Bilal's recreations of his performance art pieces "...And
Counting" and "Domestic Tension" opened Thursday, Oct. 14, in the Van
Every Gallery of the Belk Visual Arts Center.
An exhibition by North Carolina native Darren Goins titled "Casual
Language: A Mixed Emoticon" also opened Thursday evening in the Smith
Gallery.
Iraqi-born Wafaa Bilal has exhibited world-wide, and lectured
extensively to inform audiences of the importance of peaceful conflict
resolution in his home country. His 2007 installation "Domestic
Tension" placed him on the receiving end of a paintball gun that was
operable online. His website received more than 80 million hits, and
he was shot at more than 65,000 times. Newsweek magazine called the
project "breathtaking." The Chicago Tribune named Bilal its 2007
"Artist of the Year," and called the month-long piece "one of the
sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time."
Bilal's exhibition ". . . And Counting" is an ongoing project in which
the artist is having tens of thousands of dots tattooed onto a map of
Iraq on his back. The dots represent the accumulated war casualties
since 2003, with American deaths in black ink and Iraqi deaths in
green UV ink-only visible underneath a black light.
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for
1,800 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C.
Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has
graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of
the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson
Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the
nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages,
giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson
competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding
Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
