William Chan 20 Years After Iraq
November 1 – December 21, 2024
Field Projects is pleased to present, 20 Years After Iraq, an exhibition by artist and activist William Chan. On view from Nov 1, 2024 to December 21, 2024, this exhibition was timed to parallel the 2024 U.S. presidential election. William Chan served in the U.S. Army. He was deployed to Iraq in 2003 for the invasion. 10 Years After Iraq is a book he made in 2015 to hold himself and his country accountable for their mistake. The installation is centered on a dinner table commonly used by soldiers overseas. Intertwining his experiences in Iraq, the warm welcome he received coming home, and the guilt of living when so many innocent Iraqi civilians lost their lives.
Sebastian Junger, the author and Academy Award nominated director said Chan’s work on Iraq is “one of the most devastating comments on the war that I have ever seen. He is a veteran of the Iraq war and has emerged with a simple, eloquent perspective that will stop any thoughtful person in their tracks." Stephen Mayes adds, "like an arrow, this small book hits its target fast and hard, but so quietly that it’s hard to understand the quivering emotional vibration left in its wake…76 words (80 including the title) that transform mundane daily moments from 10-year-old memories into a contemporary challenge to answer the outstanding question with global significance, 'why?'"
In an interview with Road and Kingdom, Chan said “They were always ‘the others.’ I think if we ever have a war with Canada…or with the UK. It would be the most considerate war possible, because we would take every measure to think about these people. We would consider them our friends. I don’t think we ever thought that the Iraqis were our friends.”
The dehumanization allowed for the war to last 20 years. An eye for an eye after 9/11 became an eye for hundreds of eyes. Too many civilians were killed because it was easier to assume every Iraqi was a terrorist. There was a saying by some U.S. soldiers, better to be judged by twelve than to be carried by six. The Iraqi children would soon grow up to become liberators and sought their own hundred eyes. The war lasted so long, by the end, the purported terrorists weren’t even born on 9/11. In the U.S. war on terror, the United States became the terror. Chan eventually understood that other countries didn’t hate “our freedom” as described by U.S. politicians in 2001. They hated the United States’ lack of accountability and hypocrisy.
The tools Chan saw the United States used to destabilize other countries are now being used by U.S. politicians to destabilize their own. Misinformation and disinformation were engineered to sow discord for the sake of winning. Chan’s powerful work is as relevant today as it was in 2015. “If we had reflected honestly on our actions after 9/11, we would’ve responded differently after the attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023.”
William Chan is a mutual aid organizer, activist, and lecturer. His works on Iraq are taught and held at institutions such as the Tim Hetherington Library at the Bronx Documentary Center, Tate Modern, Yale University, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Harvard University, among others.