War on Walls
In 2010, Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal, an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, received 105,000 tattoos, one dot for every fatality associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom. During the same year, New York-born artist Mariam Ghani hired Afghani-Americans who had worked as translators for the U.S. military to review, on video, reports about conditions in U.S. military prisons back in Afghanistan. Resistance art has been a part of our global cultural landscape for as long as there have been powers to resist. But, to view it, listen to it, and consider it in real time, and without the mollifying balm of a faded past, is a challenging endeavor. As the artistic response by Muslims, South Asians, and Arab Americans continues to grow, from hip-hop to fine art, in the face of an unending War on Terror, Ronak K. Kapadia — cultural theorist and assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies — offers to serve as guide. Friday, he shares examples, context, and opinion from his upcoming book
Shadow Atlas: US Global Counterinsurgencies and the Sensorial Life of Empire.
— Silke Tudor
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