Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky is not shy about expressing displeasure with the political state of his country. The 29-year-old, who previously sewed his lips together to protest the 2011 jailing of Pussy Riot members (see above) and once laid outside a St. Petersburg government building with his naked body wrapped in barbed wire, took things to a new extreme over the weekend.
Like, ballsack-nailed-to-the-ground extreme. Via Metro:
He shocked visitors in Moscow’s Red Square by hammering a nail through his scrotum into cobblestones outside Lenin’s Mausoleum, on the day Russia marked its Police Day national holiday.
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In a statement posted on the grani.ru website prior to the demonstration, Mr Pavlensky had written: ‘A naked artist, looking at his balls nailed to the Kremlin pavement, is a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference, and fatalism of contemporary Russian society.’
Police eventually put a blanket on Pyotr and “removed” him from the ground. (That claw hammer is going to have one hell of a story to tell when he returns to the tool box.) He was taken to a police station after receiving some much-need treatment at a central Moscow clinic.
Considering the age we live in, it should come as no surprise that one tourist captured a short clip of the time that guy nailed his nuts to a busy Russian street. Don’t worry, it’s censored:
Video via Mail Online