ARTIST PYOTR PAVLENSKY PLANS TO GIVE PRIZE MONEY FROM HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD TO RUSSIAN GUERRILLA GROUP
Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky plans to give the $42,000 he recently received from a human rights award to members of a group of men currently in prison for carrying out a series of attacks on the Russian police, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty reports.
On May 25, Pavlensky’s partner, Oksana Shalygina, announced the decision to fund the group that calls itself Primorye Guerrillas by reading a statement written by the artist when she received the 2016 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent on his behalf. Members of the guerrilla group are currently imprisoned and serving life sentences after they became angry about alleged police brutality in Russia’s Primorye region in the Far East and began attacking authorities. They shot a traffic cop and raided a village police station, where they stabbed a policeman; both officers died.
Pavlensky was arrested in November and faces criminal charges for setting fire to a door of the Federal Security Service’s headquarters (FSB) in Moscow during his performance piece titled Threat, 2015, as artforum.com previously reported. The dissident artist is known for creating numerous works that draw attention to the widespread control of the FSB in Russia.
The Václav Havel International Prize was also awarded to the Iranian cartoonist Atena Farghadani—who originally received a twelve-year prison sentence for posting a political cartoon on social media—and photojournalist Umida Akhmedova, who is the first female documentary filmmaker in Uzbekistan. Akhmedova was accused of slander and damaging the country’s image when she published a series of photos depicting rural life in her country. Farghadani had been released and rearrested after she publicly spoke about being abused by authorities while in jail. She was officially released earlier this month. Founded by the Human Rights Foundation, the prize is jointly funded by grants from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation and the Thiel Foundation.
