Russian artist cuts off ear lobe in protest

An artist who previously hammered his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square has now cut off his ear lobe to protest against his country putting political prisoners in psychiatric wards.

Pyotr Pavlensky took the extraordinary measure after Mikhail Kosenko was put in a psychiatric ward. Kosenko had been convicted of rioting and assaulting a police officer during a protest in 2012.

Amnesty International has previously raised concerns over Kosenko being in a ward.

Pavlensky said of his latest action: “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.”

Pavlensky climbed naked on to the roof of the Serbsky psychiatric centre in Moscow before he cut off his right earlobe.

Prosecutors had previously sought to have Pavlensky undergo a psychiatric evaluation, particularly after a November 2013 incident when he nailed his scrotum to cobblestones as “a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society”.