1. Pyotr Andreyevich Pavlensky is a Russian contemporary artist.
31 Facts About Petr Pavlensky
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Petr Pavlensky is known for his controversial political art performances, which he calls "events of Subject-Object Art".
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Petr Pavlensky's "events" are inspired in part by Pussy Riot, as demonstrated in Seam, and follow in the tradition of artists such as Chris Burden, the Viennese Actionists, and Moscow Actionists Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener, Fluxus and Joseph Beuys.
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Petr Pavlensky first became known for sewing his mouth shut at a political art event staged against the incarceration of members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot.
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On 23 July 2012 Petr Pavlensky appeared at Kazan Cathedral, St Petersburg with his lips sewn shut, holding a banner that stated: "Action of Pussy Riot was a replica of the famous action of Jesus Christ ".
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On 3 May 2013 Petr Pavlensky staged a political art event aimed at showing the existence of a person caught inside a repressive legal system.
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Petr Pavlensky's assistants brought him naked, wrapped in a multilayered cocoon of barbed wire, to the main entrance of the Legislative Assembly of Saint Petersburg.
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On 10 November 2013, while sitting naked on the stone pavement in front of Lenin's Mausoleum on the Red Square, Moscow, Petr Pavlensky hammered a large nail through his scrotum, affixing it to the stone pavement.
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On 23 February 2014 Petr Pavlensky organized an event called Freedom inspired by Maidan and the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
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An investigation into Petr Pavlensky's alleged violation of the regulations on political meetings continued.
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Petr Pavlensky was charged with vandalism due to the tire burning.
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On 19 October 2014 Petr Pavlensky cut off his earlobe with a chef's knife while sitting naked on the roof of the infamous Serbsky Center to make visible the political abuse of psychiatry in Russia.
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Petr Pavlensky stood and waited to be arrested, was detained after 30 seconds without resistance, and was charged with debauchery.
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The criminal case against Petr Pavlensky was opened on 9 November 2015 under the "vandalism" section of Article 214 of the Russian criminal code.
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Petr Pavlensky was held in a psychiatric ward for a few weeks, and spent seven months in prison waiting for his trial.
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On 13 August 2016, Petr Pavlensky gave a lecture in Odessa, Ukraine which ended with the inebriated Ukrainian journalist and screenwriter Vladimir Nestrenko instigating a fight that ended with his stabbing one of two security guards who tried to subdue him.
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On 16 October 2017, in his first political art event outside Russia, Petr Pavlensky was arrested in Paris after setting fire to the street-level windows of an office of the Bank of France, located on the Place de la Bastille in Paris.
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Petr Pavlensky was charged with property damage, together with his accomplice Oksana Shalygina.
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Petr Pavlensky was initially detained in a psychiatric hospital unit, until a judge ordered him to be placed in pretrial detention at Fleury-Merogis Prison.
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On 10 January 2019, Petr Pavlensky was sentenced to three years in prison; his pre-trial detention was counted as time served and the remaining two years were suspended.
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In 2020, Petr Pavlensky created a new political art event titled "Pornopolitics," for which he launched a website presented as "the world's first porn resource to involve politicians or elected and appointed government officials".
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Petr Pavlensky explained that this material demonstrated "the hypocrisy" of the candidate who campaigned by touting "traditional family values".
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Sometimes considered as a representative of the third wave of Russian actionism or a political artist, Petr Pavlensky says he has abandoned those terms and theorises his own art practice as what he calls Subject-Object Art.
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Petr Pavlensky explains that Subject-Object Art is about arranging a certain combination of circumstances, thereby forcing officials to proceed to exercise their powers of authority and thus realise the artist's idea, namely, making power work for art.
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In 2012, Petr Pavlensky participated in the alumni and students art exhibition Oculus Two organized by the Pro Arte Foundation.
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In 2017, Petr Pavlensky participated in Art Riot at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
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In 2022, Petr Pavlensky presented Pornopolitics and Other Precedents, his first solo show in the UK.
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Petr Pavlensky was arrested on 14 February 2020 for allegedly stabbing two people in a Paris flat during a New Year's Eve party, an allegation which he denies; the case continues.
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Petr Pavlensky was awarded the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2016.
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The Prize was later withdrawn after Petr Pavlensky announced his intention to dedicate it to an insurgent group and then explicitly endorsed the use of violence as a valid method to combat governmental oppression.
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Petr Pavlensky was nominated for Russia's "Innovation" art prize in 2016, but was later barred by the National Centre for Contemporary Art on the grounds that he had broken the law, prompting four members of the jury to leave in protest.