May You Break Free and Outlive Your Enemy (2023), created especially for the Sobey Art Award, confronts us with the case of Persia’s ancient Elamite city of Susa, whose 5,000-year-old ruins were, from the 19th century on, stripped of part of their heritage by French archaeologists funded by the Louvre. This ancestral territory has also been the focus of considerable colonial interest because of its rich petroleum deposits. Many artifacts uncovered during the French excavations have ended up in the Louvre’s collections, including several Elamite funerary heads. Stuck today in “a sort of museum limbo,” these heads were originally intended to protect and guide the ancestors of the Iranian people as they descended into the netherworld.