Visiting Scholars Collaborate to Shoot Film on Case Campus

Shahram Entekhabi, an Iranian-born artist and architect, and Mieke Bal, art historian and cultural theorist from the University of Amsterdam, engage in an 8-week project as part of a seminar program sponsored by Case's Baker-Nord Center for the Humanites.

Iranian-born artist and architect Shahram Entekhabi pauses by the oval in front of the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University. He opens a suitcase and takes out a roll of red and white striped caution tape.

Atop the library with a camera rolling is Mieke Bal, art historian and cultural theorist from the University of Amsterdam. Bal captures the performance as Entekhabi unravels the caution tape, wraps it around trees and crisscrosses the oval. Students unexpectedly walk into the film’s frames as they bypass the barrier or weave under and over the tape as they head to other places.

The performance film, “Caution,” is the outcome of the collaboration between two Visiting Fellows of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities in Case’s College of Arts and Sciences. They are participants in the Baker-Nord Center’s 2004 seminar series on “Homelands and Security,” which is the first of four annual integrated Senior Faculty Fellowship seminar programs at the university. The artists join this year’s seminar group that is comprised of faculty members from the College of Arts and Sciences and from the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Prior to their visit, Bal and Entekhabi planned to produce one film. When they depart from Cleveland next week, they will leave with materials for as many as six films-in-progress.

"Normal people spend a year doing what we did in eight weeks," Bal told other Baker-Nord fellows during a preview showing of the artists’ works-in-progress at a recent seminar meeting.

Bal has written and published widely on such subjects as literary and cultural arts, semiotics, transcultural theory and contemporary culture. She now has turned to exploring ways filmmaking can be "a tool, an instance and an object of cultural analysis, all at the same time."

For Entekhabi, who now lives in Berlin, the topic of homelands and security has different meanings. The artist left his native homeland in 1978 to attend school in Italy and has never returned.

The Cleveland collaboration continues an artistic partnership that began when the two artists worked together and produced the installation exhibit, “Glub.” While at Case, they staged “Glub” at Case’s Art Studio on Murray Hill. The installation exhibit delved into the aesthetics of migration through film, video, audio and performance art. “Glub” (the Arabic word for heart) is a celebration and comprehensive view of migration and builds upon Bal’s new research project in “Migratory Aesthetics.” The work leaves Cleveland for an Ohio State University showing in January.

Looking to future installations, Bal and Entekhabi imagine “Caution” serving double duty as the centerpiece for two installations.

The first multimedia installation, “Lost in Space,” reflects and builds upon the Baker-Nord Center’s theme of homeland and security.

“Caution” serves as one piece in the installation that is envisioned to include photographs that visually and physically lead viewers to three television monitors with films focusing on home, borders and security. The televisions will air approximately 85 interviews by people in refugee camps and those seeking asylum in Macedonia and the Netherlands, as well as people from the Cleveland-area Interfaith Hospitality Network, an organization that has set up homelike accommodations for homeless families in churches across the area.

“We wanted to make a politically responsive film that was not propaganda,” said Bal. Many of the interviews were conducted prior to their visit to Cleveland. The artists sought answers to what is home, how secure did people feel and what do country borders do for a person.

The footage from “Lost in Space” reveals such reactions to the questions as “language opens up borders,” “security makes me feel more insecure,” “the average age of a homeless person is nine years old” and many more personal statements of feelings and emotions-like the woman who tells the story of the cake with 12 candles. She thought the person was celebrating a birthday but the individual was instead marking the 12th anniversary of his seeking asylum.

“Caution” also will serve as an anchor piece in the second installation that includes other Cleveland-filmed movies: “Road Movie,” a fix positioned landscape film along a long flat highway for which Bal spent hours searching; “Alcazar 2450,” a performance work based on a birthday party in the lobby of the historic residential home in Cleveland Heights where the artists stayed (and like Case students, people at the Alcazar unwittingly became part of the performance); and “Rockefeller Boulevard,” which includes scenes from the Cleveland Botanical Garden and other places in University Circle. In addition, Bal and Entekhabi chronicled their trip in photographs and written observations from its beginning in Amsterdam until their departure from Ohio. Tentatively, this personal documentary piece will be called “Diary.”

The suitcase, seen in many of the films, illustrates the sense of transience, wandering and disconnection in society, explained the artists during the discussion of their work with the Baker-Nord fellows.

In January, Entekhabi will return to update the seminar fellows on their progress toward completion of the projects

Susan Griffith

The Baker-Nord Center was established in 1996 to highlight the arts and humanities at Case. The center comes under the direction of Timothy Beal, the Harkness Professor of Biblical Literature, and Marie Lathers, associate director and the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of Humanities and French