During Wafaa Bilal’s childhood in Kufa, Iraq, his parents held one rule above all others: Do not, under any circumstances, talk about the regime.
The young artist and his friends wondered if the walls had ears. So, they devised a workaround. They would gather at the middle of the intersection in their neighborhood, tell each other the latest joke about Saddam Hussein’s government, then dash away.
Bilal, 59, now thinks of those meetups as an “underground comedy club.”
“We understood how to deal with oppression through laughter,” he said. “That was a form of empowerment.”
The traveling standup show “Amreeka” is a grown-up version of that club. Curated by Bilal, the show features a rotating roster of comics opining about “Amreeka” — a playful reference to how “America” is pronounced by some in the Arabic-speaking diaspora and elsewhere.
It started as a monthly series in New York, where Bilal lives and works as a professor at New York University. On Friday, it comes to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which is currently hosting “Indulge Me,” Bilal’s first major art retrospective.
It’s fitting that “Indulge Me” and “Amreeka” will both roost here, in the city that most shaped his practice.
Bilal arrived in the U.S. in 1992, after two years of living in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. A month after he arrived in Chicago in 2001 to pursue an MFA at the School of the Art Institute, the 9/11 attacks stunned the world.
In Bilal’s recollection, the school went from an “apolitical conceptual art school” to “political” almost overnight.
“Then it dawned on me,” he said, “that I was at the epicenter of this political storm.”
Bilal describes his art from those early years as “antagonizing.” His 2001 video installation titled “Al Qaeda R Us” confronted viewers with images of American military valor juxtaposed against the bloody human toll of those campaigns.
“The very people who contributed to the demise of my homeland were so oblivious to what happened,” he said. “So, automatically, the work was pointing fingers at them, implicating them in the destruction of my life.”
He credits his time at SAIC as redirecting him from didactic art toward an ethos of radical, even provocative, interactivity. He went on to become an adjunct professor there before getting hired by NYU in 2008.
Bilal’s change in approach was also shaped by a personal tragedy. His brother Haji was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2004; their father, heartbroken, died shortly thereafter.
Those losses — as well as a TV interview with an operator of an American drone, like the one that likely killed Haji — inspired Bilal to stage his most famous work, “Domestic Tension” in 2007.
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For a month, Bilal lived in a makeshift room in the former FlatFile Gallery in the West Loop, while remote strangers could choose to shoot him — or not — with a web-operated paintball gun. He streamed the carnage in real-time, 24/7, via live cam.
Bilal wanted to name the project “Shoot an Iraqi.” The gallery talked him out of it.
Since then, Bilal has pursued other daredevil experiments that push political satire to grim extremes. Between 2010 and 2011, Bilal surgically implanted a livestream camera in the back of his head as commentary on state surveillance; he had to end the project after a year when the scalp area became infected.
Another project — a hacked video game he called “Virtual Jihadi,” which visitors can play for themselves in “Indulge Me” — was shut down almost immediately upon its display at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute outside Albany, New York, in 2008.
A forthcoming MCA commission pokes fun at a rumored plan by Iraqi Baathists to launch a massive bust of Saddam Hussein into Earth’s orbit. Bilal plans to do the same and document its path via video feed. Of course, there’s a catch: While the spacebound Hussein will appear larger than life on the video feed, the actual bust will be just an inch. Ultimately, it will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, symbolizing the futility and hubris of the original project.
Curating a standup show may seem like an unusual side project for an artist. But for an artist with Bilal’s pitch-black sense of humor, it’s almost intuitive. After moving to New York, Bilal frequented Greenwich Village’s most iconic standup venues. He counts Jon Stewart — “The Daily Show” host who became an early critic of the Iraq War — as a personal favorite, along with Jerry Seinfeld, “regardless of what his politics are,” he said.
The first “Amreeka,” in 2016, was accidentally timed mere days after Donald Trump’s first presidential win. Bilal considered canceling that show. Instead, it went forward, doubling as much as a group therapy session as a comedy show.
“The big fear was, how are we going to be targeted as Muslims, or as an Arab minority?” Bilal said. “In order to do standup, you have to have a community, because standup relies on cultural reference.”
That has been “Amreeka’s” guiding philosophy ever since. The MCA’s “Amreeka” session will be headlined by Suzie Afridi, a Christian Palestinian comic who often speaks about her relationship with her husband, an artist from a Muslim Pakistani family.
Sharif Hasan, a Palestinian-American comic on the creative team of “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,” also will perform.
But “Amreeka” is not limited to comics with Arab roots. Also on the bill are Charles McBee and Shane Anthony, Black comics from the Midwest whose work pokes fun at American racial politics.
“It ended up being about all disfranchised people, from queer (people) to African-Americans to Middle Easterners,” Bilal said. “(We) have the same rules and rights as everyone else — and the right to complain. That’s what America is.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
“Amreeka” is 6 p.m. Aug. 22 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; tickets $30 at mcachicago.org. “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me” is on display at the museum through Oct. 19.