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.
“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.
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. At op 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.
(Susan Griffith · Senior News and Information Specialist at Case Western Reserve University · (1950 - 2022))