Reuters/Landov
Now that’s taking one for the team. Performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky went to Moscow’s famed Red Square on Sunday during lunchtime, stripped, and nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones. In a statement Pavlensky declared, "The performance can be seen as a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society. As the government turns the country into one big prison, stealing from the people and using the money to grow and enrich the police apparatus and other repressive structures, society is allowing this, and forgetting its numerical advantage, is bringing the triumph of the police state closer by its inaction." He was taken to the hospital an hour later but declined to be admitted, and was subsequently taken to the police station. As Buzzfeed noted this is not Pavlensky’s first performance that involves self-harm—he previously sewed his lips together after the jailing of two members of Pussy Riot and wrapped his naked body in barbed wire.