Almost everybody dies before Harald Szeemann’s big show.

Decapitation Index reports on a killing spree/gang war unfolding before and shortly after the artists’ arrival to Switzerland for the opening of the first major international survey of conceptual art, Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeemann for Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. The entry reproduced here is an excerpt from the complete archive, which details sixty four deaths (the three women in the exhibition Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse and Jo Ann Kaplan miraculously survive). Most plots are lifted from the murder tabloid Kurir (Serbian for "messenger") describing various ongoing Balkan mafia assassinations and retaliations.