Barbed Wire Protest Favorite 

In May, 2013, Russian performance artist Petr Pavlovsky wrapped his body, nude, in barbed wire and lay outside the St. Petersburg legislative assembly. The act was in protest of restrictions imposed on freedom of speech and assembly. Police officers were forced to attempt to disengage him from the wire. After medical officials also arrived, Pavlovsky refused to be taken to the hospital and was brought to jail, where he was held for several weeks.

In an interview he stated: "Human body is something that the power mechanisms, the state and the society try to discipline by putting into jail and causing injuries. Working with my body I show what the state does with the society. These processes reflect and are a metaphor for what is happening with the social body. Working in public space I manage to involve the actual power mechanisms into my actions".

Russian performance artist, Peter Pavlesnkiy, is accustomed to inflicting self-harm as a means of protest. When the feminist activist group Pussy Riot was first placed on trial he sewed his own mouth shut and held a banner in protest. His most recent performance took place in a public square where he protested the repressive legal system of the Russian Government. For this performance, Pavlesnkiy took off his clothes and wrapped his nude body in barbed-wire. When the police tried to remove him it only made the trap tighter. Police eventually cut him out of the contraption but not without him sustaining cuts over his entire body.

In a translated manifesto the young artist states:

"The action symbolizes man’s existence in a repressive legal system, where any movement causes severe reaction by the Law as it bites into the body of the individual. It is a metaphor of animal obedience, of “learned helplessness” that puts them into an animal enclosure of the state machine… In recent years, a series of laws were adopted aimed at suppressing civic activism, the tightening of control and intimidation of the population by the steadily growing number of political prisoners. The laws against foreign agents, the laws against extremism and the “propaganda” of homosexuality, the persecution of May 6 protesters, repression of writers and artists, Roskomnadzora’s activities, and the lawlessness of police – all this shows that the government seeks to turn people into tightly gaurded and gutless cattle, which is allowed only to work, consume and multiply."