Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension: A politics of performance in gamic space

I argue that considering the performance, the artist and the elements of the performance– in this case, a robotic paintball gun– as boundary objects sets the stage for a political strategy that reaches across demographic and ideological lines in politically charged art. This thesis is anchored in a close reading of the video blogs that Wafaa Bilal posted as an ongoing diary during the 31 day performance Domestic Tension (2007) and considers the use of boundary objects as means to create social space in performance artwork. This consideration is contextualised through other artworks using similar themes of violence in the social and political contexts in which they occurred. The two most specific examples discussed are Francisco Goya’s painting The Executions of the Third of May, 1808 (1814 Oil on canvas) and Chris Burdon’s infamous performance and subsequent film “Shoot!”. This strategy is predicated on granting a form of agency to art objects. The theoretical underpinnings of this analysis are found in the work of Anthropologist Alfred Gell, Sociologists Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law and the work of Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer. I suggest that one of the effects of granting agency to non-human actors (actants) is that it creates fluid spaces, especially in the context of performances that resemble digital games. This allows us to contextualise digital games both historically vis-a-vis similar themes in other media, and better analyze the activation of art works, especially performative ones, in our currently internet connected age

“Courageous but insolent”: African soldiers in the Dutch East Indies as seen by Dutch officials and Indonesian neighbours

Labour shortages were endemic in colonial societies. Plantation and mining labour was notoriously unattractive, but the army posed problems of its own. In their search to satisfy the voracious appetite for labour in commercial empires and colonial societies, rulers developed racial and ethnic stereotypes as to which “race” was most suitable to perform certain jobs. Africans were deemed most suitable for hard physical labour in tropical climates. They were also portrayed as “martial races”, fit to fill the manpower needs of both Islamic and European armies. This article will first give a brief overview of the use of African labour in the Dutch East Indies. Next, I discuss in more detail one peculiar aspect of inter colonial labour migration in the Dutch colonial empire: the recruitment of West African soldiers for the Dutch East Indies army in the 19th century