Shahram Entekhabi is an Iranian born artist and architect whose work has been the subject of many exhibitions all over the world, currently living and working across London, Berlin and Tehran. Shahram’s practice is framed within an urban setting and diffuses the idea of the urban space being a reserve for the practice and performance of the white, middle class, heterosexual male. He explores these ideas via a variety of performative practices using architecture, installation and digital media.
He chooses to highlight individuals who are ordinarily marginalized and made invisible or forced into self-ghettoization from the urban domain, such as migrant communities and their cultures, particularly the communities from the Middle East and its diaspora. The question of visibility and invisibility therefore is a theme he recurrently explores within his practice.

Born 1963 in Boroujerd, Iran.

• studied graphic-design at the University of Teheran, Iran; studied architecture, urbanism, and Italian language in Perugia and Reggio Calabria, Italy
• works as independent architect on residential projects and competitions
• 2001 (current) active in the fields of video art, photography, painting, drawings, installation, performance and community art
• 2004 exhibition architecture and exhibition designer of “Entfernte Nähe. Neue Positionen Iranischer Kunst”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (catalogue)
• 2004 fellowship at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland/OH, USA
• 2006 Vasl Lahore 2006 (residency), Lahore, Pakistan.
• 2007 Live Art UK Touring Commission R&D grant
• 2007 "HIGH ART" London & Berlin

Selected Exhibitions 2007

• Krieg der Knöpfe (War of the Buttons. Children and the World of War) — Landesmuseums, Linz, Austria
• Abwehr Performance Festival — Performances at the last watchtowers of the former GDR in Berlin, Germany
• LED-Wall, Zeithaus, VW Autostadt, Wolfsburg, Germany
• HAZARD: Performance Festival— Manchester City Centre, UK
• Commè amaro stu ppane — Centre d'art Nei Liicht, Dudelange, Luxembourg
• Sin cobertura. Independent Video from the Middle East— Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
• War of the Buttons. Children and the World of War — Århus Kunstbygning Center for Contemporary Art, Århus, Denmark
• IDEAL.LOOP — Espace Croisé, Roubaix Cedex 1, France

Selected video presentation, festival and artist talk

• ART RADIO LIVE, PAN | Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Italy
• "e-flux Video Rental", Centre culturel suisse, Paris
• EVR BOSTON (e-flux video rental) — Boston, USA
• Vidéoclub d'artistes proposés par les critiques/artistes — Centre culturel Suisse, Paris, France
• PERFORMS— CENTRE D’ARTS plastiques et visuels, Lille, France

Mieke Bal,

a cultural critic and theorist, is Professor of Theory of Literature and a Founding Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Theory and Interpretation (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam, as well as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Her most recent publications are Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (University of Toronto Press, 2002) and Mieke Bal Kulturanalyse (Suhrkamp, 2002). Among her many other books are: Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Artwriting (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Looking In: The Art of Viewing (G&B Arts International, 2001); Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (University of Chicago Press, 1999 [2001]); Narratology: An Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (2nd, thoroughly revised and expanded edition, University of Toronto Press, 1997); The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford University Press, 1997); Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (Routledge, 1996); and Reading 'Rembrandt': Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1994]). She also edited a programmatic volume The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation (Stanford University Press, 1999). Her areas of interest include literary theory, semiotics, visual art, cultural studies, transcultural theory, feminist theory, French, the Hebrew Bible, the seventeenth century and contemporary culture. Her current research centres around four themes: "narratology between the disciplines", which may lead to a replacement of her revised and expanded Narratology (1997) and focus on fully integrating the interdisciplinary perspective she has developed over the past decade; "travelling concepts", now a book, as a result of her intense involvement with the ASCA Theory Seminar and her conviction that reflection on and deployment of concepts can make an indispensable contribution to interdisciplinary cultural analysis; "in time: between performance and performativity": a project based on the cluster of aspects of the two terms, to be developed into a book with a theoretical grounding and involving literary texts as well as contemporary art; "preposterous history", to further exploit the idea broached in her book Quoting Caravaggio. She is interested in linking theory and practice in the domain of art presentation. In this context, she recently made a series of nine 61/2-minute video clips, Art Clips, on audience interaction with single art works. With Shahram Entekhabi she made Eye Contact in 2003, a 10 minutes film on an exhibition of works by Louise Bourgeois. Also in 2003 she made a film on migrancy in France, with a collective of five video artists called Cinema Suitcase. This film, Mille et un jours, has been shown in a number of European universities, most recently at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam and the Lichthaus Kino in Weimar. She works with Shahram Entekhabi on a number of projects on migratory aesthetics.