When Art Refuses to Obey, Power Reveals Itself: An Interview with Pyotr Pavlensky
Questions on Power, Silence, and Tamed Art
From Putin’s Russia to France, and from there to a Europe that prefers to absorb dissent rather than ban it: eight questions to an artist who has brought conflict into the body itself.
Link to the Italian version on Artribune
In 2012, during the Pussy Riot case, a strong gesture almost impossible to ignore: Pavlensky (Saint Petersburg, 1984) sewed his lips shut outside Kazan Cathedral. It was not a metaphor; it was a public device. Since then, his practice has insisted on one simple idea: an art event does not live only in its final image, but in the chain of reactions it forces into view: police, courts, prisons, media campaigns, museums. The action becomes a question that cannot be filed away.
Today that stance takes theoretical form. In December 2025 Pavlensky published Subject–Object Art Theory, where he describes his practice as “subject–object art” and rejects the now elastic label of “political art.” If “political” means everything, he argues, then it means nothing. This interview begins there: tracing the grammar of control in democracies when censorship appears not as a ban, but as normalization. For me, it is also a test of the word “freedom.”
The Interview with Pyotr Pavlensky
In Seam and Carcass, the body shows how power silences and immobilizes. Do those images still speak mainly about Russia, or also about the West?
When I carried out these events of subject–object art, I made visible the situation of the contemporary artist in Russia, since I did not know what was happening in other countries. After I moved to live in France, I can now say with complete confidence that in this country the situation with regard to artists is exactly the same: namely, there is no artistic freedom here. In fact, since 2012 nothing has changed for me; I still feel like a person with his mouth sewn shut and wrapped in barbed wire. And judging by what French artists tell me about their lives, this sense of the world is not something I experience alone.
Looking at Putin’s Russia today, is it an authoritarian exception, or a clearer version of the same mechanism found elsewhere?
Russia cannot be called an authoritarian exception in its attitude toward artists. For the sake of fairness, I should clarify that I left the country at the end of 2016, and that from 2022 to 2023 censorship there became harsher. Still, if one compares how the apparatuses of power in Russia and in France tried to force me to stop my artistic practice, the basic mechanics were the same. In certain methods of repression, France turned out to be far more sophisticated and, strangely enough, even crueler.
With exile in France and Lighting, your conflict with power changed form. Did exile bring more freedom, or a more skillful repression?
No, I did not gain more freedom, because there is no artistic freedom in France. France treats contemporary art as an instrument of political propaganda, a way to avoid direct agitation while transmitting core ideological dogmas by translating them into another sign system and reproducing them in new materials and forms. The authorities carefully ensure that publicly exhibited art serves this function and delivers ideological benefit. To show how serious this is: from 2015 to 2021 the president of the Centre Pompidou was Serge Lasvignes, a high-ranking agent of the French secret services. The question is simple: why would the government appoint a senior intelligence agent to lead one of the world’s most internationally significant museums?
In Threat and Fixation the target was clear. Today, in Western democracies, where is it: the state, media, institutions, economic fear, or artists policing themselves?
Neither in Russia nor in France did I have any physical “targets” in the sense you mean. What I needed was a context that would allow an event of subject–object art. Context, gesture, and title together constitute an image, and converting reality into new images is the only aim of visual art. It is the twenty-first century, but in this sense I am no different from Caravaggio, or from artists of past epochs. As for other artists, it is not simply that their independence has been taken away; they have been forced to forget what it is. They should be pitied, not treated as “targets.”
Much contemporary art speaks the language of politics inside institutions that can neutralize conflict. How much political art still acts as opposition, and how much has become a refined form of obedience?
In 2021 I refused to use the term “political art” for my practice, because the phrase has been stretched so far that almost anything connected to “politics” gets placed inside it, from political cartoons to state propaganda. Some also use it to label every form of oppositional agitation. The term that most accurately describes my practice is subject–object art. Put as briefly as possible, it is the only kind of art today that changes art’s position in relation to power and forces power to work for art.
After works that made the body a target and the trial part of the artwork, are you thinking about a new performance shaped by where you live now or by a global conflict?
I think about many things. But the practice of an artist is more multifaceted than it is commonly assumed to be. And at the moment I need to solve two problems. The first concerns the discourse of my type of art, in which there was an obvious lack of precise terms and definitions. I have already begun to address this problem, and in December my book Subject-Object Art Theory was published. The second concerns the problems of exhibition. Because for eleven years of my practice I was engaged only in events, it was therefore inevitable that there was no one to deal with exhibition tasks, and for this reason all the exhibitions, in my view, were mediocre. And this problem must also be resolved.
If power has learned to absorb almost everything, including dissent, scandal, and art itself, is there still a gesture that it cannot neutralize?
Hmm… Of course, it is not easy to be an artist, and many times the authorities of different countries have undertaken various attempts to destroy my works of art. The authorities acted especially cruelly toward the event Pornopolitics. In France, in addition to heavy judicial prosecution, an incredibly large-scale disinformation campaign was launched in the media aimed at discrediting me as an artist and the total destruction of this artwork. This lasted for three years, but I cannot say that in the end the authorities succeeded in completely neutralizing Pornopolitics or my other artworks.
SUGGESTED BOOK: Pyotr Pavlensky: Subject–Object Art Theory
