Nadya Tolokonnikova, a cofounder of the anarchic feminist art collective Pussy Riot, has announced her first museum show at the OK Linz Center for Contemporary Art in Austria. “Rage” will spotlight the group’s most recent protest pieces that confront patriarchal and religious repression and Vladimir Putin’s aggressive regime.
A highlight of the exhibition will be the presentation a video work that was released shortly after the arrest of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2021. It called for his freedom and the release of all political prisoners in Russia, but filming of the work was interrupted by the authorities and its participants were arrested for “propaganda of homosexuality.” The video has gained new poignance following the recent news of Navalny’s death in a Russian prison.
“Most of my life, even after two years of imprisonment, I chose to stay in Russia, even though I had plenty of opportunities to immigrate,” Tolokonnikova said. “I tried to change Russia, make it a country that I would be proud of—peaceful, prosperous, friendly, democratic, loving.”
Instead, Tolokonnikova said she watched her “friends being murdered and revolutions suffocating under Putin’s boot,” something many fear in the wake of Navalny’s death.
Pussy Riot cover of Time Magazine from 2012. Image courtesy of OK Linz.
“The most radical act of rebellion today is to relearn how to dream and to fight for that dream,” she added.
The OK Linz exhibition will spotlight many of the activitist actions led by Pussy Riot over the years. At the center is Tolokonnikova’s 2022 performance Putin’s Ashes in which she burned a portrait of Putin, collecting the ashes in small bottles with 12 women from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia who had also experienced repression and aggression at the hands of the Russian president.
An outspoken activist, Tolokonnikova grew up in a remote Arctic town in Siberia but turned to performance art upon moving to Moscow in 2007. Four years later, she co-founded Pussy Riot and the group began staging illicit live performances, eventually getting arrested and sentenced to two years in a labor camp for performing the anti-Putin anthem “Punk Prayer” in a Moscow cathedral.
Reflecting on her 17 years of protest performance art for the OK Linz show, Tolokonnikova recalled a mix of “camaraderie, harassment, arrests,” as well as great pain.
Cover for Pussy Riot’s Matriarchy Now mixtape from 2022. Photo: Ksti Hu, courtesy of OK Linz.
As well as creating site-specific actions, Pussy Riot have also produced sculpture and installation works, including self-referential sex dolls dressed up in the group’s signature pink balaclavas. Pick Your Poison, a group of gaudily colored but enticing candy machines that will also be on view in the exhibition, makes sardonic reference to Putin’s penchant for poisoning his opponents.
Though Tolokonnikova has left Russia, doing museum shows in the West does not come consequence-free. The 2022 show “Putin’s Ashes,” which opened at Jeffrey Deitch’s L.A. gallery before traveling to venues in Sante Fe and Dallas, landed her on Russia’s federal wanted list. This time, she was being charged with disrespecting Christian imagery for peddling an NFT in which the Virgin Mary appears in the form of a vulva. The activist has a been categorized as a “foreign agent” by Russia since 2021.
Curated by Michaela Seiser and Julia Staudach, “Rage” will open at the OK Linz in June 2024.
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