A still from the movie The Road, Shahram Entekhabi and Mikke Bal
The Suitcase as a Signifier of Displacement: The Artist Between Work and Movement
This text examines the suitcase as both a material object and a symbolic figure within the experience of migration, exile, and displacement—an object that, from the nineteenth century onward, gradually became a defining sign of forced travel and acquired a stable presence in artistic and museological narratives in the twentieth century. Focusing on the historical trajectories of Marcel Duchamp and Walter Benjamin, the suitcase is read simultaneously as a portable portfolio for preserving an artistic oeuvre and as a temporary refuge for safeguarding thought and history. The text then turns to the presence of this object in contemporary art and the Iranian diaspora, particularly in the works of Shahram Entekhaby, where it functions as a sign of rootlessness. Ultimately, the suitcase places the migrant artist and thinker in a paradoxical condition: suspended between the preservation of memory and identity and the perpetual movement imposed by exile and displacement.
4 January 2026
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The Suitcase as a Signifier of Displacement: The Artist Between Work and Movement 4 January 2026
This text examines the suitcase as both a material object and a symbolic figure within the experience of migration, exile, and displacement—an object that, from the nineteenth century onward, gradually became a defining sign of forced travel and acquired a stable presence in artistic and museological narratives in the twentieth century. Focusing on the historical trajectories of Mar...