Performing and Translating Activism into Art. A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

In May 2007, Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal confined himself to Chicago’s Flatfile Gallery for thirty-one days. He decided to live in a room under the 24-hour surveillance of a webcam connected to the web together with a robotic paintball gun that allowed both the audience in the gallery and online users to shoot the artist with sticky yellow paint. Domestic Tension is part of a provocative project proposed by Bilal to contribute to the discussion on the separation between ‘comfort zones’ – the safe spaces where war is imagined and articulated both linguistically and visually – and ‘conflict zones’, the many war-torn areas across the world whose voices are often lost. The project was accompanied by a video diary posted on YouTube and the book Shoot an Iraqi (2008). The book not only enriches the experience engendered by the event of the performance but also makes the YouTube video commentaries more explicit. In this sense, it acts as a form of translation of the several modes of communication of the artist. Integrating Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2021) and Machin and Mayr’s (2023) models, the article will adopt a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis perspective to investigate both the visual and the linguistic aspect of Bilal’s multi-semiotic and intermedia art project. Bilal’s intervention is crucial in this process not only by showing the complex dynamics of the racialised regimes of visual power and the intersemiotic strategies of resistance, but also by offering a performative counter-narrative that translates the otherwise inexpressible condition of living in a conflict zone.