The Moment of Death: When Does It Occur?
The separation of the head from the body happens almost instantly, but complete death, due to the cessation of blood flow to the brain, takes between a few seconds and several seconds.
Some historical evidence suggests that the brain may remain active for 5–10 seconds after decapitation.
Usage during the French Revolution:
- First official use: April 25, 1792, in Paris
- Primary execution device during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794)
- Famous victims: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre
After the Revolution, the guillotine remained France’s official execution device.
- Last official use in France: September 10, 1977
- Complete removal from the judicial system: 1981 (with the abolition of the death penalty)
Guillotine Specifications:
- Design: A heavy inverted triangular blade, a tall wooden structure to guide the blade, and a special platform for securing the victim’s neck
- Mechanism: The blade drops from a great height, separating the head from the body in an instant, designed for public execution
- Dimensions: Typically 4–5 meters tall, blade weight 40–60 kg
- Purpose: To minimize pain and suffering, efficient for mass executions
- Symbolism: Became a symbol of revolutionary terror and justice
“Revolution Devours Its Own Children”
Research-based art is a form of artistic practice in which research and investigation serve as the foundation for creativity and artistic production. The artist employs various research methods, such as data collection, document study, interviews, and fieldwork, to create works deeply rooted in thorough inquiry.
This type of art is also genealogical—it retraces the conceptual evolution of a subjective or objective phenomenon, either returning it to its historical context or translating it into a contemporary form.
Confronting the audience with what is often considered someone else’s problem, this approach opens a window to the phenomenology of perception, questioning, unraveling, and even reconsidering history as the site of accepted collective narratives. This transformation of the general into the specific is of great importance, as it shifts the investigation of an individual case from a purely subjective experience to one that resonates with broader existential dimensions.
In other words, research-based art is not merely research, as it engages the audience through aesthetic means and structured artistic form. At the same time, it is not purely art, as it is grounded in Aristotelian mimesis. However, in this case, mimesis itself is rooted in documentation (the foundation of research), making the basis of such an artistic approach neither purely autonomous nor entirely free, but rather a genealogical and research-oriented creation—unless the artist deliberately takes a parodic approach to history, disregarding research material altogether and instead exploring hidden layers through a form-conceptual deconstruction.
What Taha Zaker has done in curating Hoda Sargordan’s work is a reexamination of a historical period through a central authorial perspective.
The history of the guillotine and its use across different historical periods has been linked through a central concept.
We know that the guillotine was designed by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin in 1789 to ensure quick and painless executions. The time it took for the blade to drop and for the victim to die was exceptionally brief—historical and scientific research suggests that the guillotine blade fell at a speed of approximately 7 meters per second, completing the process in less than 0.5 seconds.
Significantly, Taha Zaker recognized the importance of this brief moment, in which an irreplaceable human life was extinguished, leaving the spectators disillusioned. This disillusionment stems from the frustration of witnessing violence—the spectator of violence is both a witness and a participant in the banality of evil.
Ironically, this exposure and transformation of violence is what eventually turns its enforcers into spectators, and this spectator’s disillusionment ultimately transforms them into an advocate for violence.
Here, violence transitions from being a state-sanctioned act of power into something desired and accepted by the masses as a spectacle. However, the transformation of violence is a more complex issue, as it is deeply tied to the exercise of power.
The exchange of roles between the executioner, the judge, and the audience is part of the process of turning the specific into the universal.
In Taha and Hoda’s exhibition, the spatial design takes the form of a labyrinth, while a monotone, cold, report-like narration of various guillotine executions echoes throughout the maze.
Wherever a voice fades, a new voice emerges—this is the curatorial intelligence of Hoda, whose team has meticulously executed their vision.
Meanwhile, the interactive games designed for the audience, allowing them to operate the guillotine, bring this particular historical violence into the contemporary narrative, binding the spectator to it once again.
This is crucial, as we often view distant atrocities as unrelated to us, failing to recognize the hidden mechanisms of power that require violence to function.
But who can deny that violence is so deeply woven into our streets, alleys, stores, and institutions that it often goes unnoticed?
Hoda and Taha have sought to challenge this perception—by researching one of the most overt instruments of violence, originally conceived as a tool for justice, they have taken a parodic approach to this very claim, urging the audience to confront not only explicit violence but also its more insidious, hidden forms.
The labyrinthine nature of this exhibition, with its research-based, performative, and interactive elements, ensures that the viewer is continuously shifted from one aspect of violence to another, oscillating between the personal and the collective.
The presence of emergency exits implies that one is both the subject and the object of violence, and if one wishes to escape this dual role, a way out is provided (if it exists at all).
The throne-like chair, conspicuously vacant of a ruler, carries at least two meanings:
- Its Baroque design, paired with its modern asymmetry, suggests that yesterday’s violence is today’s violence.
- It does not matter who sits on the chair, as it is the seat of power itself that legitimizes violence.
The chair is elevated on a platform, yet the ruler is absent—so you may sit upon it, as you, too, are an enabler of violence.
Other interactive installations similarly draw the audience into the banality of violence, turning them from mere spectators into active participants.
The rotating cube, with its visible wounds revealing its inner steel framework, both spins and roars, making it a central element of this narrative.
Yet, it carries another meaning: violence is constantly being renewed, perpetually reconstructing itself upon invisible foundations.
The cube may also serve as a metaphor for the fragility of seemingly stable structures—it stands firm yet is always on the verge of collapse (just like us today).
The use of surveillance cameras, allowing the audience to see themselves within them, aligns with the phenomenology of perception, offering an immediate reflection of oneself within the mirror of violence and vice versa.
The core success of this exhibition lies in its ability to bring fragmented historical narratives into contemporary discourse.
Has the exhibition achieved this goal? To a great extent, yes.
By constructing a metaphor for an unexperienced history, the exhibition allows for a deeper understanding of the hidden frequencies of violence-entertainment dynamics.
Thus, if revolutions devour their own children, beginning with violence and ending in another cycle of violence, then the ultimate farce is justice itself—for which the guillotine falls, disappears, yet remains an enduring symbol in history.
And justice?
The throne of any ruler is inherently its antithesis—so perhaps it should be overturned, shattered, and discarded.
Aidin Amini
