Editor's Note: This story contains graphic images.
KIEV, Ukraine -- The controversial Russian performance artist and political activist who nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Moscow’s Red Square last year sliced off his earlobe in his latest protest against the return of repressive Soviet-era policies.
Naked and sitting atop a wall at Moscow’s Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry, Pyotr Pavlensky, a St. Petersburg native, severed his right earlobe with a large kitchen knife on Sunday in a performance aptly titled "Separation."
In a statement posted to his wife’s Facebook timeline, Pavlensky said his performance was a meant to symbolize the consequence of “returning to the use of psychiatry for political goals” in Russia.
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Post by Oksana Shalygina.
“By again using psychiatry for political goals, the police give themselves the power to separate the sane from the insane,” he said. “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.”
Police apprehended the composed but blood-covered Pavlensky before transporting him to Moscow’s Botkinskaya Hospital, Russia’s TV Rain reports.
On Monday, his lawyer, Dmitry Dinze, said he thought the artist might have contracted pneumonia, The Guardian reported. However, Dinze told the British newspaper later that Pavlensky did not have pneumonia or more serious complications from the amputated earlobe and was expected to be discharged soon.
The Serbsky institution was notorious in Soviet times for declaring political dissidents as mentally ill in order to quash their actions. Human rights groups contend that the practice has resurfaced in Russia after Mikhail Kosenko, a Bolotnaya Square protester, was declared insane by the institution and sentenced to indefinite psychiatric care.
More recently, Nadiya Savchenko, a Ukrainian military pilot who is a candidate in this week’s parliamentary elections but was captured by Moscow-backed rebels, is on trial in Russia for conspiring in the deaths of two Russian journalists covering the war in eastern Ukraine.
Kiev and human rights groups have said the charges against her are politically motivated. Savchenko has been undergoing a psychiatric examination at the Serbsky institution since last week.
Pavlensky is known for his gruesome, self-mutilating public performances. In November 2013, he famously stripped naked and nailed his scrotum to the pavement on Moscow’s Red Square to protest against “the apathy and political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society.” In May 2013, Pavlensky wrapped himself naked inside a ring of barbed wire in front of the St. Petersburg legislative assembly. In July 2012, he sewed his mouth shut in front of Moscow’s Kazan Cathedral to protest the prosecution of the Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot.
Pavlensky underwent a psychiatric examination at the Moscow hospital where he is being held on Monday and was declared sane for the third time.