Pjotr Andrejewitsch Pawlenski born 1948 in St. Petersburg is a Russian performance and concept artist as well as a political activist.
Actually, the young Pjotr was trained to become a muralist. However, it was not his painting skills that made him famous. He came to fame through his crazy protest performances. Those who have weak nerves should definitely stop reading.
I’m giving you a little summary of his craziest performances:
He sew his mouth shut when members of the punk band Pussy Riot were arrested. Later on, he stood in front of the Russian government building naked and wrapped in barb wire. Another famous performance involved Pjotr nailing his scrotum to the Red Square in Moscow in order to criticize the Russian police system that is supposedly infested with corruption and recklessness. This time however, the police arrested him. He was charged of hooliganism.
The last big performance that hit the headlines was just another bloody act of protest, literally. He sat on the roof of the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry and cut off one of his ear lobes. Why did he do this? He justified his action with the following statement: “The knife separates the earlobe from the body. A concrete wall of psychiatry separates the reasonable from the mad patients. By again using psychiatry for political goals, the police give themselves the power to separate the sane from the insane”
Well, you see… if you want to draw attention to deficiencies in Russia, you have to be extreme…
