Russia's best known contemporary artist arrived to deliver a lecture to an over filled hall in Odesa's Impact Hub on August 12 night. He was ascetic, strikingly skeletal, possessed of an undeniable dignity and bearing. Hundreds of people excitedly packed the lecture hall, this was widely expected to be the event of the summer. Petr Pavlensky was newly freed from a Russian prison cell in the wake of becoming a dissident cause célèbre for having set the doors of Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison on fire. The lecture's title was a double entendre that translated roughly as the 'usage of a person' or the 'consumption of people', hinting broadly at the theme of mechanized cannibalism. However fittingly, this electrifying lecture calling for wide scale resistance to tyranny and the everyday deployment of the mechanisms of social oppression, concluded in violence. Somewhere , one can imagine Mayakovsky smiling.
The Odessa Review: Russian conceptual artist Pavlensky gives lecture on violent political art, evening ends with lethal brawl
Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky poses after setting fire to the doors of the headquarters of the FSB security service, the successor to the KGB, in central Moscow early on November 9, 2015.
