Video Works

TRANSIT M

TRANSIT M

In Transit M, Shahram Entekhabi returns to the recurring figure of M, developed in his earlier video works, including i? (2004) and Road Movie (2004). More than two decades later, the artist revisits this solitary character, transforming his ongoing journey into a reflection on migration, memory, visibility, and the passage of time.

Dressed in a worn dark suit and carrying a battered turquoise suitcase, M moves through roads, urban margins, and spaces of institutional control. His encounters reveal the contradictions between the promise of welcome and the experience of exclusion. The suitcase becomes both a repository of personal memory and a fragile symbol of belonging.

The work also turns toward the artist's own history. Through reflections, doubles, and shifting perspectives, M encounters another version of himself, while the filmmaker confronts a figure he first created more than twenty years earlier. The boundaries between observer and observed, past and present, and artistic representation and lived experience begin to dissolve.

This return resonates with Mieke Bal's concept of preposterous history, in which contemporary artistic practices do not merely revisit earlier works but actively reshape their meaning. Just as Entekhabi's i? (2004) reconsidered Samuel Beckett's Film (1965) through the experience of social invisibility, Transit M revisits the artist's own earlier investigations from the perspective of a changed present.

In Bal's reflections on Road Movie (2004), the figure's disappearance into the vanishing point reveals the limits of what the viewer can know about another person. In Transit M, this unresolved encounter takes on a further dimension: the artist himself becomes implicated in the act of looking back, confronting both his earlier creation and the passage of time.

Neither entirely autobiographical nor purely fictional, M remains an open figure whose journey continues beyond the possibility of a definitive arrival.

Miguel 2026