- Artist or Maker
- Wafaa Bilal
Iraq, born 1966, active United States - Title
- Chair from the series Ashes
- Date Made
- 2003-2013
- Medium
- Inkjet print (pigment based)
- Dimensions
- Image: 41 × 50 in. (104.14 × 127 cm)
Frame: 42 1/2 × 51 1/2 × 2 in. (107.95 × 130.81 × 5.08 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2013.117
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Contemporary
- Curatorial Notes
This picture of abject annihilation portrays the horror of war through an absence of human life and an
eerie, dust-covered setting. Still more unsettling is the realization that the room with its throne-like chair is
actually a doll-sized model magnified dramatically by the photograph. The scene is a handmade
reconstruction of one of the many media images that document the destruction caused by the
decade-long war in Iraq.
Wafaa Bilal, an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, fled Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq in 1991. He is known internationally for his provocative performance pieces and interactive
works. In the series Ashes, to which this photograph belongs, the ashes covering the models include
human remains. The powerful photographs capture and reflect Bilal’s own reactions to the war as an
exiled Iraqi who experienced the devastation of his home not merely through media imagery but through
the deaths of his father and brother.
