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.
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.
FEATURED
MIGUEL 2026
2026 / 01:21 min
In Miguel 2026, the artist re-performs a scene that was first created in 2005. Twenty years have passed, and the same actions take place in the same place: a bearded man in paramilitary clothing looks at the camera, loads a revolver, laughs, and pulls the pin of a grenade. The piece transforms the original provocation into reflection. The body documents its own actions, comparing them to the memory of the first piece.
RELATED WORKS
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.
FEATURED
MY MOTHER – THE HISTORY OF IRAN
2015 – single channel 50:09 min
A mother’s life as a mirror of a nation’s history.
Personal memory intertwines with the political and cultural transformations of Iran.
RELATED WORKS
FEATURED
NO EXIT / BERLIN
2011 – single channel 05:09 min
Part of the project: ↳ LINES OF CONTROL
In NO-EXIT, a figure is positioned inside a confined structure with no visible way out. The body moves within a space that offers neither entrance nor exit, repeating gestures that lead nowhere.
The figure remains visible, yet restricted – present, but unable to act beyond the given limitation.
The work transforms spatial confinement into a reflection on systems that regulate movement, visibility, and the body itself.
RELATED WORKS
Documentation / Extended Context
Video documentations of spatial interventions, capturing participatory processes, public reactions, and site-specific conditions.
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.
FEATURED
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 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.
FEATURED
HAPPY MEAL
2004 / 12:10 min
Shahram Entekhabi’s video works traverse performance, film essay, and urban intervention. Across different contexts, the works examine how social attributions, political images, and cultural projections are constructed and perceived within public space.
In these works, the body functions as a primary medium. Through minimal gestures and subtle actions, familiar situations are shifted, revealing the underlying structures that shape perception and social reality.
RELATED WORKS