Shahram Entekhabi

FIGURES, IMAGE & POWER
Works across drawing, photography, performance, installation, and staged imagery

FIGURES, IMAGE & POWER brings together works in which bodies, figures, images, and systems of belief become sites of negotiation. Across drawing, photography, performance, installation, and staged imagery, Shahram Entekhabi examines how cultural codes and structures of power shape what can be seen, believed, desired, remembered, or concealed. Existing images are overwritten, rituals re-enacted, symbols displaced, and familiar objects placed in unfamiliar constellations.

The approach is critical without becoming adversarial. Entekhabi works from within the cultural forms he examines, implicating himself in their mechanisms rather than positioning himself outside them. Humor, irony, appropriation, and self-staging become precise instruments of inquiry: they allow images and beliefs to be turned around, tested, and made visible in their contradictions. What emerges is neither denunciation nor affirmation, but a sustained examination of how identities and realities are produced.

PERFORMED RITUALS (72 Virgins)

These works place ritual and ceremony at the centre of the image: courtship, marriage, mourning, devotion, and martyrdom become performances through which belief, gender, and communal identity are publicly enacted. Rather than observing these forms from a distance, Entekhabi enters them himself. He becomes groom, martyr, participant, and author of his own mythology.

The repeated structure of the series is crucial. Transferred from one city to another, the same premise encounters different social and cultural conditions. Each iteration therefore changes the meaning of what is being performed. The ritual becomes a stage on which inherited expectations can be seen as constructed, repeated, and negotiated.

72 VIRGINS / BERLIN

2009 . single-channel video, 18:06 min

At Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau, 72 women dressed in black, each holding a tulip, participate in a staged wedding ceremony with Entekhabi, who assumes the role of the martyr promised paradise. The solemn vocabulary of devotion meets the theatrical logic of performance. Within a major art institution, the ceremony becomes an image of belief in public: a deliberately constructed encounter in which religious promise, spectacle, gender expectation, and the artist's own self-image converge.

72 VIRGINS / KALININGRAD

2009 . two-channel video & photographic series (Includes the related work *72 Courtship, Kaliningrad*.), 14:06 min

A newspaper casting call invited 72 women to perform as "brides." Entekhabi staged a traditional courtship with them and subsequently visited the grave of Immanuel Kant, in a local custom associated with weddings in Kaliningrad. Two distinct cultural references are thus brought into the same performative structure: a regional wedding ritual encounters the mythology of martyrdom and paradise that underlies the series. The resulting image is at once specific to its place and deliberately unstable, allowing one ritual to illuminate the assumptions embedded in another.

Performed Rituals" by Shahram Entekhabi: staged wedding ceremony with the artist and several women dressed in black holding tulips — an ironic take on the religious martyr's-paradise promise, not depicting an actual wedding

72 VIRGINS / GENEVA

2011 · HD video, 17:42 min

In Geneva, the series moves once again into a new social and cultural setting. Its recognisable structure remains, but its meaning shifts with the context in which it is performed. Repetition becomes a method of comparison: by transferring the same ritual framework between cities, Entekhabi makes visible the expectations surrounding gender, belief, public behaviour, and collective identity—not as fixed truths, but as conditions continuously produced through performance.

VEILING & CENSORSHIP

These works begin with images that already exist. Rather than producing an alternative representation, Entekhabi intervenes directly in the existing one: covering, veiling, and overwriting the female body. The gesture recalls state-enforced censorship of women's images in the Islamic Republic, while simultaneously turning toward the Western fashion and advertising industries, where the female body is idealised, exposed, circulated, and commodified.

The intervention therefore works in two directions at once. The black veil is neither presented simply as a sign of oppression nor as its opposite. It becomes a device through which different systems of controlling visibility can be made to confront one another. What appears to be an act of censorship also exposes the fact that images are never neutral: they are already shaped by cultural codes, economic interests, political ideologies, and expectations of desire.

ISLAMIC CARDING

2008 · installation: 605 prostitute cards, permanent marker · overall 400 × 160 cm (each card approx. 16 × 10 cm)

*Islamic Carding* consists of 605 found cards advertising sexual services, collected from London's public telephone boxes. Entekhabi intervenes in each image with a black permanent marker, covering the represented bodies with the silhouette of a chador. Repeated 605 times, the same gesture transforms a multitude of commercial images into a single monumental field of interruption.

The work brings two seemingly opposed regimes of visibility into direct contact: the commodification and public circulation of the female body, and its concealment through religious and political codes. By placing the black veil over an image that is itself already constructed for consumption, Entekhabi reveals the extent to which both visibility and invisibility can be regulated. The act of covering thus becomes an act of disclosure: it makes the structures governing the image itself visible.

DAS KLEINE SCHWARZE

2005–2011 · series of 10 posters, each 180 × 120 cm

Here the gesture takes its point of departure in fashion advertising. Female figures are covered with the black veil, transforming the seductive imagery of the fashion industry into a field of tension between concealment, display, desire, and control.

The work brings the enforced veiling of women in Iran into dialogue with the Western beauty industry's own construction of the female image. Rather than assigning moral authority to either side, Entekhabi turns the image back upon itself. The familiar language of fashion remains legible beneath the intervention, while the veil exposes the mechanisms by which bodies are made visible, desirable, and culturally intelligible.

Shahram Entekhabi, "Veiling & Censorship" series: found imagery overpainted with the black chador — a critical gesture aimed at both state-enforced veiling and Western beauty ideals at once

ISLAMIC VOGUE

2001–2005 · intervened German *Vogue* magazine, pages veiled in black

Three years before *Islamic Carding*, Entekhabi extended the same intervention to an entire issue of German *Vogue*. Page after page, every woman pictured is covered in black, while the magazine's headlines, layouts, and language of fashion remain intact.

The result is deliberately absurd and uneasy. The intervention reproduces the logic of censorship within the very medium through which fashion constructs its ideals, allowing the two systems to become momentarily indistinguishable. What is removed from view consequently becomes as significant as what remains: the image continues to sell, but the conditions of its visibility have been exposed.

POWER, VIOLENCE & IDEOLOGY

Here the body encounters more explicit structures of authority: political ideology, violence, punishment, militarisation, bureaucracy, and the symbolic machinery through which power disciplines the individual. Suits, weapons of protection, coffins, bodily gestures, and bureaucratic or ideological images recur as signs of systems that organise life while claiming to regulate it.

Entekhabi repeatedly places himself inside these structures. The artist is not an external observer of power but one of its subjects, carrying, performing, inhabiting, or reproducing the roles through which power becomes legible. Personal memory and political history consequently overlap, allowing the intimate and the ideological to occupy the same image.

ATLAS SHRUGGED

2013–2017 · drawing series, watercolor on paper, 42 × 56 cm each

This series responds to Ayn Rand's *Atlas Shrugged* (1957) and the philosophy of Objectivism that surrounds it. Entekhabi casts himself as the novel's protagonist, but removes the figure from the grounded world of conventional narrative. The grey-suited artist, accompanied by a travel case, appears in spaces without depth or stable ground.

Rand's ideal of the autonomous, self-made individual is thus displaced into the experience of migration and constructed identity. The figure who is supposed to stand entirely on his own becomes instead a traveller, a body suspended between places. The drawings turn a philosophy of individual sovereignty into an image of the conditions under which identity is actually assembled.

CHALLENGE YOUR SUPREMACY

2017 · ballpoint pen on paperboard, 95 × 75 cm

From the *Panchatantra* series, the drawing presents a lion confronting a rabbit who holds up a mirror. The image recalls the Persian fable in which the weaker animal defeats the powerful through self-reflection rather than force.

Entekhabi brings this inherited narrative into the present as a compact meditation on power. The mirror redirects violence toward perception itself: supremacy depends not only on strength, but also on the image the powerful have of themselves. A traditional tale consequently becomes a contemporary proposition about authority, vulnerability, and the limits of domination.

TABUT (COFFIN)

2012 · ballpoint pen on paperboard, 118 × 175 cm

*Tabut* returns to the funeral of Entekhabi's father, witnessed by the artist as a child. The experience of early loss became connected to his subsequent emigration from Iran, giving the drawing a personal point of departure that gradually expands into an image of time, memory, and departure.

The coffin is elongated to an impossible scale, while the artist appears repeatedly as pallbearer. Through multiplication and extension, the drawing transforms a remembered event into a sequence: the repetition suggests the passing of time, but also the flickering continuity of film. Personal memory becomes both image and movement.

FALAK (FEET TORTURE)

2012 · ballpoint pen on paperboard, 70 × 100 cm

*Falak* addresses the practice of foot-sole torture in Iranian political history. Although officially banned for a century, the practice was documented during the Pahlavi dictatorship and later reappeared in the context of forced televised confessions under the Islamic Republic.

The drawing confronts violence not as an isolated historical event but as a recurring technique of political power. The body becomes the place where authority is made physical: punishment turns ideology into sensation, and the supposedly abstract machinery of the state acquires a bodily form.

The work is part of the permanent collection of the Artothek, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin.

BULLETPROOF BOHO

2018 · embroidery on bulletproof vest

*Bulletproof Boho* places embroidery, traditionally associated with ornament, domestic labour, and care, onto an object designed to protect the body from violence. The juxtaposition is deliberately unstable. Decoration and defence, vulnerability and protection, intimacy and conflict occupy the same surface.

The bulletproof vest ceases to function solely as military equipment and becomes a contested body-object. Through the addition of handwork, Entekhabi introduces another history of labour and gender into an object associated with force, asking how bodies are prepared, decorated, protected, and disciplined within systems of power.

CONVERTS

2011 . five part drawings, 38.5 x 125 cm

*Converts* constructs a malfunctioning image system. The original images were designed to communicate clear, direct messages; Entekhabi interrupts that clarity by drawing over, disrupting, and partially obscuring them.

The intervention does not simply destroy the original information. Instead, it exposes the structures that made the information legible in the first place. Cultural codes, economic interests, and ideological frameworks are revealed as active forces within visual communication. Once overwritten, the images cease to deliver a stable message and begin to negotiate with the viewer.

FRESH ME

2009 . ink, pencil, ballpoint pen and adhesive foil, on paperboard, 120 x 80 cm each

*Fresh Me* inserts Entekhabi's own features into nineteenth-century European representations of Middle Eastern men. The gesture is playful, but its humour is inseparable from a sharper critique of the historical construction of the "Oriental" figure.

By appropriating and inhabiting these images, Entekhabi performs a form of self-exoticism. The migrant body becomes both subject and object of the gaze, exposing how identities are historically framed, classified, desired, and made recognisable through inherited visual stereotypes.

The work was shown at AARAN Gallery, Tehran (2011), and Hilger BROTKunsthalle, Vienna (2010).

ME

2012 . drawing series, ink and foil on paperboard, 34 x 48 cm

In *Me*, the artist appears as a solitary figure moving through the city. The series was first shown in *M* at the Taj Mahal Hotel, Tehran (2021), and earlier in *The State In Between in Contemporary Iranian Art*, Linz (2012).

Critic Farough Mazloumi connected the work to the literary figure of the flâneur: the wanderer who moves through modernity while remaining simultaneously inside and apart from it, observing and being observed. The figure therefore becomes another version of the artist's recurring position—present within the social world, yet never entirely absorbed by it.

PAPA RISHU

2019 · ballpoint pen on paperboard, 120 × 80 cm

*Papa Rishu* reflects on the clichés projected onto Middle Eastern men and folds them into a historical reference far removed from their apparent origin. The long beard becomes a point of connection to Tsar Peter I's beard tax, through which Old Believers were compelled to shave in the name of modernisation.

By transferring the beard—and its threatened removal—onto himself, Entekhabi turns an apparently familiar marker of Middle Eastern identity into a mobile historical sign. The drawing unsettles the assumption that cultural symbols belong securely to one place or identity, revealing instead how they can be imposed, adopted, rejected, or transformed.

HAMAL

2012 · ballpoint pen on paperboard, 70 × 100 cm

*Hamal*, the Farsi word for "porter" or "carrier", presents Entekhabi as the bearer of a load. The figure gives physical form to a recurring condition in his work: the self is never entirely separate from what it carries.

The artist appears simultaneously as burden and bearer, carrying the weight of others while being carried by the histories, expectations, and relationships that constitute him. Self and other consequently exchange positions. Carrying becomes reciprocal, and identity emerges not as a fixed possession but as a weight continually transferred between bodies.

Herr Karl aus Nemsa

2004 . installation: video, photography and videos

Developed with Helmut Kandl, *Herr Karl aus Nemsa* reworks ethnographic photographs from a European archive together with quotations from the novels of Karl May. Images that once claimed the authority of documentary evidence are removed from their original context and placed in relation to a literary imagination of the foreign.

The work exposes the instability of the archive as a supposedly neutral repository of knowledge. Photography, literature, and colonial fantasy converge in the construction of the "Other"; by rearranging their relationship, Entekhabi makes visible the ideological framing through which distant people and places become recognisable to a European gaze.

Four drawings combining blue figures with ornamental forms and Persian mythological references

Quartet Drawings

2011 . four ballpoint pen and metal dust on paperboard, 80 × 80 cm each

In *Quartet Drawings*, Entekhabi moves from direct social observation toward a more symbolic and mythological visual language. Delicate blue figures intertwine with ornamental forms and references drawn from Persian mythology, creating images in which the body becomes inseparable from cultural memory.

The works bring autobiography, surrealism, ornament, and understated political tension into the same field. Their apparent delicacy is deceptive: beneath the sensual surfaces lies a precise investigation of how bodies carry histories, symbols, and inherited structures of meaning.

HOME, MEMORY & DISPLACEMENT

The final group shifts the investigation from the body and the political image toward the objects through which belonging is remembered. A carpet, a chair, a peep-show box, a key, a house sign, and even a failed financial document become carriers of memory.

These objects do not simply represent home. They test what remains of home after departure: what can be carried, what has to be left behind, what becomes transformed by distance, and what still promises access to a place that may no longer exist. Memory here is material, portable, and unstable.

SHAHRE FARANG

2009 · installation: object, metal, 160 × 120 × 50 cm · animated video · drawing

*Shahre Farang* reconstructs the traditional Persian peep-show box whose images once brought distant places and imagined worlds into Iranian streets and courtyards. Literally meaning "City of the Foreigners", the device was itself an instrument for looking outward.

Entekhabi turns that mechanism back upon the experience of displacement. A childhood form of looking becomes a structure through which distance, spectacle, memory, and the foreign are reconsidered. The object no longer merely shows another world; it becomes an image of the act of looking itself, and of the distance separating the observer from what is remembered.

HOME

2005 · light box, chromed steel, 180 × 75 × 40 cm

he light box quotes a sign from Stanley Kubrick's *A Clockwork Orange*, which appears twice in the film: once before an act of violence, and later when a wounded man seeks shelter without recognising the house.

Removed from the film and placed within the context of migration, the word "HOME" becomes deliberately ambiguous. It promises security while carrying the memory of violence. Entekhabi's displacement of the sign turns a familiar word into a question: is home a place of protection, a place of danger, or a condition whose meaning changes with the person who enters it?

SEAT

2003 · carpet, chromed steel, 230 × 145 cm

*Seat* draws on the traditional rooftop seating used during Tehran's summers while also recalling the magical image of the flying carpet from *The Thousand and One Nights*. Domestic familiarity and imaginative escape are condensed into a single object.

The work was installed as a permanent fixture in the Video Lounge of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, from 2003 to 2012. Its function is consequently both practical and symbolic: a place to sit becomes a vehicle for memory, carrying the architecture of one place into another.

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

2005 · installation: share certificates folded as paper planes

Following the collapse of the CargoLifter airship company in Brandenburg, Entekhabi acquired 470 shares in the failed corporation—one for each employee who lost their job—and folded them into paper planes. The public was invited to fold their own copies in the same way. Alongside roughly 900 planes, a framed depot statement documenting the artist's share ownership remains as evidence of the financial object from which the installation emerged.

The transformation is at once literal and ironic. A speculative document becomes a fragile object of flight; an investment in a technological future becomes a monument to its failure. The paper plane holds together aspiration and collapse, capital and labour, fantasy and economic reality.

KILID

2004 . installation: aluminium board, 150 colored bulbs in green, white, and red, keys, 640 x 260 x 25 cm

A six-metre key constructed from aluminium, keys, and 150 coloured lights, *Kilid* refers to the small plastic keys given to Iranian child soldiers during the Iran–Iraq War as symbolic tokens with which they were promised access to paradise after martyrdom. The key turns a political and religious promise into a monumental object.

Installed in 2004 at a former GDR watchtower on Berlin's Cold War death strip, the work brought together two histories of ideological division and human sacrifice. The coloured lights—green, white, and red—also recall the illumination of public spaces in Iran during weddings, religious celebrations, national occasions, and commemorations. The key consequently carries several meanings at once: death and escape, belief and coercion, memory and survival.

For Entekhabi, the object is also inseparable from his own departure from Iran and the life he chose in exile. A key that was once offered as a promise of passage into the afterlife becomes, in the artist's hands, a monument to another kind of passage: the decision to leave, to survive, and to construct a life elsewhere. First presented in the exhibition *Far Near Distance: Contemporary Positions of Iranian Artists* at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, the work brings the personal, the political, and the symbolic into a single image.

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FIGURES, IMAGE & POWERWorks across drawing, photography, performance, installation, and staged imagery