This chapter explores how performance art, infused with body modification, challenges institutional power that regulates “deviant bodies.” I adopt a practice-based methodology, focusing on my ongoing project PT #1392, a performance for camera involving bodily manipulation practices, to investigate how institutions construct definitions of “abnormality” in relation to gender and sexuality. PT #1392 is therefore situated as a research method for generating knowledge through embodied actions. This study also employs artistic autoethnography, positioning my body within the performance as a contested site: disciplined, scrutinized, and pathologized, yet capable of subversion and resistance. In this context, my experience in PT #1392 functions as a critical lens to interrogate institutional power over the body. Conceptually, the performance engages with theories of biopower, deviance, and self-determination to confront institutional mechanisms of bodily normalization, employing body modification as a form of defiance. Such interventions are not merely aesthetic expressions; they are political acts that reject normative frameworks and reclaim agency through pain and the exposure of the body’s vulnerability. However, through the interplay of practice and theory, the study demonstrates how radical performance art confronts dominant narratives of conformity, reclaiming the “abnormal body” as a site of autonomy and resistance.