Russian performance artist convicted of vandalism for pro-Ukraine protest
A Russian court on Thursday convicted a radical artist with a penchant for self-mutilation on vandalism charges for a 2014 performance celebrating the mass street protests in Ukraine that helped topple pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovich.
Officials said the artist, Pyotr Pavlensky, will not serve prison time for the 16-month sentence announced Thursday because the statute of limitations had expired in the case.
But he remained in custody and faces charges in a separate case involving fire being set to the doors of the Moscow headquarters of the Federal Security Service, Russia’s main successor to the Soviet KGB, in November.
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The 2014 case involved Pavlensky and several other performance artists building a barricade with tires, scrap metal and wood on a bridge in St. Petersburg. They hoisted Ukrainian flags and set the barricade afire to support the pro-Western protesters on Maidan square in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, who burned tires to create a smokescreen against snipers in February 2014. Yanukovich left Kiev late that month and went to Russia.
“Maidan was a celebration, and a celebration is a people’s feast on the corpse of daily life,” the gaunt 32-year-old artist said in a video posted by the Grani.ru, an online publication that has been banned in Russia.
In November, Pavlensky doused the massive wooden doors of the Federal Security Service building with gasoline, lighted them, posed for a photograph and waited for police to detain him.
Pavlensky said the performance symbolized what he called the Kremlin’s policies of “incessant terror” to keep Russians in submission and fear. He was charged with vandalism and forcibly committed to the Serbsky psychiatric clinic in Moscow for a three-week-long evaluation.
Pavlensky’s partner, artist Oksana Shalygina, said in an interview that she expects the security service case to result in prison time for him.
“They know what to do — to try him like a criminal, to declare a creative gesture a crime once they could not declare it a pathology,” Shalygina said. “But this is Pyotr’s field of work.... This is a declaration of borders and forms of political art.”
In 2014, Pavlensky staged a performance on the roof of the psychiatry clinic. Sitting naked, he cut off his earlobe, imitating Van Gogh’s famous self-mutilation act to protest the use of psychiatry against Kremlin critics.
In 2012, Pavlensky sewed his mouth shut to protest the criminal charges against the members of the Pussy Riot feminist band for their “punk prayer” against Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2013, he nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Moscow’s Red Square as a metaphor of political apathy in Putin’s Russia.
This month, the New York-based nonprofit Human Rights Foundation announced that Pavlensky was one of its recipients of the 2016 Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent.
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Mirovalev is a special correspondent.
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