Guillotine Pendant Necklace with Moving Blade

Entertainment in Public is an interdisciplinary art project by Iranian artist Taha Zakar. The project emerged through a confrontation with the ongoing reality of execution and the death penalty in contemporary Iran. Developed through archive-based installation art, documentary film and research-based artistic practice. Entertainment in Public examines the history of execution as an ongoing political and historical structure rather than a closed historical subject.

For Taha Zakar, history functions as the primary material of the work. Through archival research and interdisciplinary contemporary art practice. the art project traces the transformation of violence from early forms of punishment to the guillotine era and contemporary systems of public violence. Entertainment in Public explores how execution became spectacle and how public execution shaped collective political imagination, and modern forms of state violence.

Moving between archive, installation and documentary practice. the project connects historical violence to execution in Iran and the continuing presence of the death penalty in the contemporary world. Entertainment in Public operates as a large scale, archive based art project that brings together research, video essays, documentary production, publications and interdisciplinary installation in order to examine the relationship between violence, public memory, spectacle and Iranian contemporary art.