Performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky on the wall of the Serbsky psychiatry centre where he sliced off part of his earlobe in a protest action he called ‘Segregation’
Artist Pyotr Pavlensky cut off a part of his earlobe while sitting on the wall enclosing the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry during his protest action titled “Segregation” in Moscow on Sunday. Pavlensky was protesting against the usage of psychiatry for politically motivated purposes. He cut off his earlobe to demonstrate how authorities could “cut off” an unwanted individual from society by using psychiatric and medical diagnosis to forcefully send a person to a penitentiary hospital, according to Pavlensky. “The knife severs the earlobe from the body. The granite wall of the psychiatric institute separates the sane from the insane. The police give themselves the power to determine the threshold between reason and madness,” Pavlensky explained.
Pyotr Pavlensky, a St. Petersburg-based performance artist, was removed from the wall by police and taken to a Moscow hospital. Pavlensky’s lawyer Dmitry Dinze said on Monday that the artist would likely be discharged from the hospital fairly quickly after being treated for the injury.
In a statement on his wife’s Facebook page on Sunday, Pavlensky said that cutting off his earlobe was meant to represent the damage resulting from police “returning to the use of psychiatry for political goals”.
Pavlensky wrote: “Armed with psychiatric diagnoses, the bureaucrat in a white lab coat cuts off from society those pieces that prevent him from establishing a monolithic dictate of a single, mandatory norm for everyone.”
The Serbsky centre is infamous for giving questionable diagnoses to many of the dissidents who were confined to psychiatric wards in the USSR. In April, a protester in a demonstration in Bolotnaya Square, Mikhail Kosenko, was sentenced to indefinite psychiatric treatment after the Serbsky centre declared him insane, a decision that Amnesty International condemned as a return to that Soviet-era practice.
Nadiya Savchenko, a Ukrainian pilot who was captured by pro-Russia separatists, is being tried for complicity in the deaths of two Russian war correspondents on charges that human rights groups have called politically motivated. She has been undergoing a psychiatric evaluation at the centre since last week.
Prosecutors have been seeking to have Pavlensky undergo a psychiatric evaluation as part of a vandalism case brought against him after he burned tires on a St Petersburg bridge in February in support of the Kiev protests that toppled the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich.
Last week, a St Petersburg district court turned down for a second time a request to have Pavlensky committed to a psychiatric institution. However, on Monday the artist underwent a psychiatric evaluation at the Moscow hospital and was declared sane, Dinze said.
Pavlensky, who has a long history of self-mutilating protests in Russia, gained international attention in November 2013 when he undressed and nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square as “a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society”.
He has also wrapped himself naked in barbed wire in front of the St Petersburg legislative assembly and sewn his lips shut to protest at the prosecution of the punk-rock activists Pussy Riot.