A Russian performance artist and activist who previously nailed his testicles to the cobbles in Moscow’s Red Square, has now cut off his ear lobe atop the roof of a psychiatric institution.

Pyotr Pavlensky, a performance artist, previously nailed his scrotum to the cobbles in Moscow’s Red Square in protest against Russia’s anti-gay laws.

Then on Sunday he was removed by authorities after cutting off his right earlobe with a kitchen knife in his protest piece titled ‘Separation’.

Pavlensky’s latest protest was against the use of forced psychiatry on political dissidents, and took place atop the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry.

“The knife separates the body from the earlobe. The concrete wall of psychiatry separates the sane society of the insane patients. By returning the use of psychiatry for political purposes, the police apparatus regains the power to determine the border between sanity and madness. Being armed with psychiatric diagnoses, a bureaucrat in a white robe cuts off from the society those pieces that prevent to establish a monolithic dictate of the norm, which is the same for all and necessary for everyone.”

Pavelensky has carried out similar acts in the past, including sewing his lips together against the jailing of two members of Pussy Riot, and wrapping his body in barbed wire outside a government building.

In his previous performance, he attacked Russia’s “police state.”