Video Works

MIGUEL 2026

MIGUEL 2026

Restaging Time

Twenty-one years after the original video, Shahram Entekhabi revisits Miguel (2005) through a precise restaging of the work. Every gesture, camera movement, edit, and action follows the structure of the earlier version as closely as possible. What initially appears as an almost identical repetition gradually reveals an essential difference: the passage of time.

While the original composition remains largely unchanged, the body of the performer has inevitably transformed. Aging becomes visible within a structure that resists alteration, exposing the impossibility of fully reproducing an earlier moment. The body functions simultaneously as performer, document, and living archive.

Beyond the physical transformation, Miguel 2026 also revisits the cultural and political projections surrounding the original character. What was once presented as an image of perceived threat and constructed identity is now reconsidered through the artist's accumulated experience and the historical distance separating the two performances.

In this sense, the work resonates with Mieke Bal's concept of preposterous history, in which the present does not merely follow the past but actively reshapes its interpretation. By returning to his own earlier performance, Entekhabi transforms repetition into a critical encounter with artistic memory, representation, and the changing conditions of visibility.

The work does not attempt to recover the past, but makes visible the distance that separates the present from it.

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