workspace - Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

May 2012
Daniel Bejar was born in the Bronx and lives in
Brooklyn. His interdisciplinary practice utilizes
intervention, sculpture, performance, and
photography as tools to appropriate historical and
cultural residue as strategies to create ruptures
within established narratives. Bejar received a
BFA from the Ringling College of Art & Design,
Sarasota, FL and an MFA from the State University
of New York, New Paltz in 2007. In 2011, Bejar was
selected to Smack Mellon’s Hot Picks program
and completed a residency at SOMA, Mexico City.
Additionally, Bejar has participated in residencies
at Vermont Studio Center, LMCC’s Swing Space
program, and the Artist in the Marketplace Program
at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Bejar’s work has
been exhibited internationally, with recent venues
including El Museo’s sixth Bienal, The (S) Files
2011; SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; Artnews Projects,
Berlin; and the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
WAFAA BILAL
wafaabilal.com
DANIEL BEJAR
danielbejar.com
Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal, an Assistant
Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch
School of the Arts, is known internationally
for his online performative and interactive
works provoking dialogue about international
politics and internal dynamics. For his
current project, the 3rdi, Bilal had a camera
surgically implanted on the back of his head
to spontaneously transmit images to the web
24 hours a day -- a statement on surveillance,
the mundane and the things we leave behind.
Bilal’s 2010 work …And Counting similarly
used his own body as a medium. His back
was tattooed with a map of Iraq and dots
representing Iraqi and US casualties -– the
Iraqis in invisible ink were seen only under a
black light. Bilal’s 2007 installation, Domestic
Tension, also addressed the Iraq war where
he spent a month in a Chicago gallery with a
paintball gun that people could shoot at him
over the internet. Bilal’s work is constantly
informed by the experience of fleeing his
homeland and existing simultaneously in two
worlds.
VISUAL ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES
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