VIDEO WORKS

Shahram Entekhabi’s video works traverse performance, film essay, and urban intervention. Across different contexts, the works examine how social attributions, political imagery, and cultural projections are constructed and perceived within public and mediated space.

The body functions as a central medium. Through minimal gestures, repetition, and staged actions, familiar situations are subtly displaced, revealing underlying structures of perception, control, and representation.

PERFORMED NARRATIVES

These works position performance as a central method of constructing narrative. The artist appears as both author and subject, developing characters that move between fiction, projection, and social reality.

Through repetition, staging, and minimal gestures, identity emerges as a temporal and constructed condition. Several works revisit earlier actions, allowing time, memory, and the body to become part of the narrative structure. In recent works such as Transit M and Miguel 2026, this return becomes an artistic method in itself, reconsidering earlier images and performances through the experience of time.

TRANSIT M

Revisiting a character developed more than two decades earlier, Transit M follows a solitary figure navigating the uncertain space between migration, memory, and belonging. Through reflections, doubles, and shifting perspectives, the work transforms the artist's earlier investigations of visibility and displacement into an encounter with his own artistic past. Echoing Mieke Bal's concept of revisiting history, the film explores how the present reshapes our understanding of earlier images and experiences.

MIGUEL 2026

Miguel 2026 re-performs an earlier action after two decades, placing the same body, location, and gestures against the memory of their first appearance. The repeated image shifts from provocation toward reflection, turning performance into a form of temporal self-observation in which the body becomes both document and archive.

INSTIGATOR

Instigator stages the figure of the migrant body as a charged presence within public space. By exaggerating gestures, costume, and attitude, the work exposes how quickly an individual can be transformed into a cultural image, caught between self-performance, social projection, and the political expectations attached to visibility.

I am John Galt

I Am John Galt enters the fictional world of Ayn Rand through the body of the artist, turning the heroic image of the self-made individual into a question of identity and belonging. The performance places autonomy, ideology, and migration in tension, asking how a supposedly universal model of the individual changes when performed from another position.

SELF PORTRAIT AS A FOUNTAIN

Self Portrait as a Fountain uses the artist’s body as a simple but unstable image of self-representation. The familiar motif of the fountain is displaced through performance, allowing the body to become at once object, image, and source, while questioning how the self is constructed through repetition and recognition.

ISLAMIC STAR

Islamic Star uses performance to construct and exaggerate a culturally recognisable male figure. Through clothing, gesture, and symbolic signs, the work explores how stereotypes are projected onto the body and activated through the gaze of others in public space. As Julia Allerstorfer-Hertel notes, the figure is shaped through “ironic-satirical exaggeration” and “a play with attributions.

FRESH SINEZANI

Fresh Sinezani turns a culturally recognisable sign into a performative image that is deliberately detached from a stable narrative. Through the artist’s body, gesture becomes a surface onto which expectations about origin, belief, and difference are projected, exposing the unstable space between cultural reference and individual identity.

GWAI LO

Gwai Lo works with the figure of the foreigner as an image produced through appearance and social expectation. The artist enters public space as a constructed character, allowing ordinary encounters to become moments in which visibility, cultural projection, and the reading of the unfamiliar body are brought into focus.

PER UN PUGNO DI EURO

Per Un Pugno di Euro uses the figure of the migrant and the language of the Western film to stage identity as a performance. Familiar cinematic codes are displaced into everyday space, where masculinity, mobility, and economic value become intertwined, revealing how cultural images can shape the perception of the person who performs them.

Haji Firuz

Haji Firuz brings a familiar Iranian figure into a contemporary performative context, shifting a festive and culturally specific image into a field of observation. The work uses transformation and repetition to question how tradition is carried across places, and how cultural symbols change when they are seen from within migration.

GLOBE

Globe presents the body as a moving point within a world of shifting cultural references. Rather than offering a fixed geography, the work allows identity to appear as something negotiated through movement, observation, and projection, connecting the personal experience of migration with the abstract idea of global space.                                              

EGALITARIAN

Egalitarian approaches the idea of equality through the instability of the performed body. By placing a constructed figure within an ordinary social environment, the work questions whether equal visibility is actually possible when bodies are already read through cultural codes, expectations, and inherited images of difference.

I AM AN ELEPHANT

I Am an Elephant turns the body into an image of excess, memory, and displacement. The transformation is neither literal nor purely humorous; it allows the artist to occupy an unstable position between human identity and symbolic figure, opening questions about belonging, difference, and the stories projected onto the visible body.

THE "M" CHARACTERS
2005- ONGOING

This body of work centres on a recurring figure developed over time through performance and video. The character operates as a mutable construct, shifting across contexts while retaining a consistent visual and behavioural language.

Rather than forming a fixed identity, the figure evolves through repetition and displacement, reflecting on processes of projection, memory, and the construction of self within changing social and political environments.

Miguel 2026 re-performs an earlier action after two decades, placing the same body, location, and gestures against the memory of their first appearance. The repeated image shifts from provocation toward reflection, turning performance into a form of temporal self-observation in which the body becomes both document and archive.

MLADEN

Mladen constructs the figure of the dangerous immigrant and places him within the everyday flow of Berlin. The apparent threat remains unresolved, because the character does not act violently; instead, the performance turns the viewer’s own expectations into the real subject, exposing how fear and stereotype are projected onto a silent body.

I?

i? introduces the migrant figure through a split and unstable sense of self. Two versions of the artist move through fragmented situations of recognition, observation, and pursuit, making identity appear less like a fixed essence than a continuous negotiation between self-image, external perception, and cultural projection.

MIGUEL

Miguel radicalises the constructed migrant figure into an image of paramilitary masculinity and implied violence. Yet the weapon remains part of the performance rather than a real act, creating a gap between appearance and action in which fear, aggression, and the stereotype of the threatening foreigner are exposed as unstable constructions.

MEHMET

Mehmet condenses the figure of the migrant “other” into a minimal but highly charged public action. The apparently dangerous situation is never completed, creating a tension between what the body suggests and what it actually does, and revealing how quickly appearance, posture, and cultural codes can determine a viewer’s interpretation.

NARRATIVE WORKS

Longer video works in which personal biography, historical memory, and fictional storytelling converge. These works expand beyond performative situations into layered narrative structures.

FEATURED

RELATED WORKS

URBAN INTERVENTIONS

Performative interventions in public space that engage with systems of control, visibility, and spatial regulation. These works use minimal gestures to alter environments and expose the structures that govern movement and presence.

Documentation / Extended Context
Video documentations of spatial interventions, capturing participatory processes, public reactions, and site-specific conditions. (↳ LINES OF CONTROL)

SERIES: 72 VIRGINS

A series of performative interventions developed across different cities, primarily existing through photographic documentation. Each iteration responds to its specific socio-political and cultural context.

FILMIC COLLABORATIONS & HYBRID WORKS
A filmic series developed in collaboration with Mieke Bal (2004–2005).

Works developed in collaboration or situated between narrative film, installation, and spatial experimentation.

GLUB
2004 Video installation – single channel / multi-screen 30:00 min

A filmic installation in which everyday gestures become a site of displacement, where meaning unfolds through repetition, and the act of looking.

EARLY WORKS / EXPERIMENTS

Early video works exploring performance, timing, montage, and the relationship between body and camera. These works establish formal strategies that later evolve into more complex structures.