This article is concerned with an extraordinary artwork created by a young Swedish art student, Anna Odell. Odell's re-enactment of an earlier suicide attempt on a bridge in Stockholm, filmed for an art installation, caused an outcry from the public and medical authorities and a court case that stimulated heated debate in the national press. Here I examine Odell's work for the 'critical' questions it in turn provokes about artistic creation and communication: the difficulties for the performance scholar in addressing the enactment when it is so generically hard to define; why the art/artist was found guilty of a 'fraudulent practice'; and what might be revealed and further problematized by theorizing the enactment as a cultural, socio-political event.