Francisco Garcia

On 1 November 2024, a concrete canopy collapsed at the renovated railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city, killing fifteen people and severely injuring two more. Three weeks later, as students and academics at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts held a silent vigil for the victims, they were attacked by a group of masked men. Last week I spoke with Vanja Šević, a 22-year-old graduate student at the university. ‘The response has been way bigger than we thought,’ she told me. ‘It is a fight for justice. The message is that we can’t tolerate this any more.’ 

On the afternoon of 12 April a prisoner climbed onto the roof of Strangeways in Manchester. Joe Outlaw, aka Chris Attiller Hordosi, has been incarcerated in a series of high security jails across the UK since being convicted for robbery and served with an indeterminate sentence in 2011. The 36-year-old surrendered to the prison authorities twelve hours later, having painted his message on the roof in large white letters: ‘FREE IPPZ.’ Imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences were introduced in the mid-2000s by David Blunkett, at the peak of New Labour’s ‘tough on crime’ posturing. They were, in theory, only to be used in exceptional cases.

An exhibition on public executions has to maintain a delicate balance: leaning too gleefully into the gore would be in bad taste, but it would also be a mistake to sanitise it.