Artist Pyotr Pavlensky Is In France As A Political Refugee, But He’s Burning Banks And Messing With Elections. What Is He Really Up To?

His various art “actions” (as he calls them), along with his apparently high pain threshold, have earned him international notoriety and a good deal of sympathy. Yet he seems to have squandered quite a bit of that sympathy in France, where his actions haven’t gone down so well. Valeria Costa-Kostritsky talks to associates and observers of Pavlensky in Russia and France and tries to unpack it all. – Apollo