Latest news with #Tolokonnikova
Hypebeast
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Nadya Tolokonnivo to Stage 10-Day Performance from Inside Prison Cell
Summary In 2012, punk rock bandPussy Riottook to Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour for a sub-minute performance of their song 'Punk Prayer.' While the piece has since beenheraldedas one of the best artworks of the 21st century, the event landedNadya Tolokonnikova, the group's co-founder, in a Russian prison for two years on the grounds of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.' Now, over a decade later, Tolokonnikova is going back behind bars, but this time, it's on her own terms. For 10 days, the Russian conceptual artist will confine herself to a steel replica of a Russian jail cell as part ofPOLICE STATE, her debut durational performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. The installation, which takes part in MOCA's Wonmi WAREHOUSE Program, will transform the space into a stark, immersive panopticon, where viewers will be able to watch her via security camera feed and peepholes throughout the museum. Inside the cell, Tolokonnikova will perform a range of audio works, from haunting lullabies to abrasive soundscapes. Drawing from her own time in the penal system, the piece merges personal history with larger themes of control, surveillance and psychological endurance. 'The cell becomes a paradox: a site of confinement and liberation, despair and creativity,' the museum described. 'Through this interplay, Tolokonnikova invites the audience to grapple with the mechanisms of oppression while seeking the sparks of hope that resist it.' The performance confronts the brutal realities of confinement, and in true Pussy Riot fashion, examines the relationship between structures of authority and their impacts on the human capacity for STATEwill be on view from June 4 through Jun 15 at MOCA. Head to the museum'swebsitefor more information. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles250 S Grand Ave,Los Angeles, CA 90012
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Pussy Riot Artist Is Back in Prison (This Time, by Design)
Nadya Tolokonnikova, the founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, has long experienced the threat — and reality — of government surveillance. After the group's anti-Putin, balaclava-wearing, punk-inspired performance at Moscow's main Orthodox Cathedral in 2012, she spent nearly two years in Russian prison. On her release, she was tracked by the police. Since 2021, the year when she was declared a 'foreign agent' by Russia's ministry of justice, she has lived in exile, bouncing from city to city in what she calls a state of 'geo-anonymity.' Next month, the outspoken Russian activist and artist will be subject to another kind of surveillance — in a jail of her own making. From June 5 to 14, Tolokonnikova, 35, will be spending her days in a corrugated-steel replica of a decrepit Russian prison cell, installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles. She will eat, drink and use the toilet in her 'cell,' and will perform some of her aggressive noise-music rage-screeds there. Visitors can watch her through peep holes and a security camera feed. 'It's my first durational performance,' she said, using a term for the stamina-testing genre popularized by the artist Marina Abramovic, who is a close friend. Tolokonnikova was sipping tea at a long, pink-rimmed table in the shape of a Russian Orthodox cross — her own design — in a temporary studio in Los Angeles. 'I'm used to the intensity of short outbursts of energy.' The MOCA show, 'Police State,' is in one sense a reckoning with her incarceration, during which she went on three hunger strikes and published an open letter describing 'slavery-like conditions.' She recalls how women in her penal colony were forced to work 17-hour shifts in a sewing factory at risk of injuries and even death. She has since tried TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation), anti-depressants and psychotherapy to process the experience, with mixed results. 'For me personally talk therapy didn't work — I don't love to talk about my feelings. But I'm interested in renegotiating trauma, rewriting your own personal history to bring your creativity into the mix,' she said. 'This is art therapy, basically.' At another level, the museum show is a condemnation of carceral conditions and human rights violations in her homeland and beyond. The idea came, she said, after she saw a concrete-box replica of the brutal solitary cell used to confine her friend and mentor, the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who died in prison in 2024. Tolokonnikova called this installation, created by his younger brother, Oleg, 'one of the best works of public art and political art I've seen. 'The police state isn't a distant experience for me and those I care about,' she added in her soft-spoken cadences — the message more pointed than the delivery. 'Russia has more than a thousand political prisoners, whose only fault was to say that the emperor is naked. The best people of Russia are behind bars.' Since 'Police State' is debuting during a time of high-profile detentions and deportations by the Trump administration, it is bound to be read as a critique of this government's actions as well. 'I think she's really speaking to the current political moment,' said Alex Sloane, the associate curator of MOCA, who is developing the project. 'We can't see these things — the human rights abuses, government overreach and the targeting of specific communities — as being isolated to Russia any more.' Or as Tolokonnikova quipped at the studio: 'Authoritarianism is like a sexually transmitted disease — you have it before you know it.' She went on to describe the rise of a 'tech-bro oligarchy' in the United States and rapidly shifting international alliances, which she said could impact her safety. 'Travel has become increasingly dangerous for me, mostly because I was put on this international wanted list by Russia at the start of the year, but also because of Trump becoming more friendly with Putin.' She pulled out a bag of red foam clown noses, offered me one and popped one on herself. She broke out laughing and suddenly looked like a goofy teenager, her black plaid skirt giving strong schoolgirl vibes. 'Imagine being so serious and worrying about your safety all the time. Put the clown nose on and everything is just fine,' she said, noting that she originally used the noses to 'troll' her clown-fearing husband, John Caldwell. This tension between gravity and levity, and a razor-sharp sense of humor, infuses many of her artworks. While she continues to organize some collective street actions under the Pussy Riot rubric, she has recently been showing painting and sculpture, or more accurately objects akin to them, in gallery and museum settings under her own name. Her first solo museum show, 'RAGE,' opened at OK Linz in Austria last summer. This month, she has one exhibition at Nagel Draxler gallery in Berlin, 'Wanted,' and another at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles, 'Punk's Not Dead.' And surrounding the mock prison cell at MOCA, she is installing her artworks and sculptural elements, including a gumball machine she's filling with colorful balls marked with the names of poisons, like Polonium and Novichok, which have been used on Russian dissidents. The centerpiece of 'Punk's Not Dead' is a stainless steel slide that you might imagine on a playground if its surface did not resemble a supersized cheese grater. The show also contains several of her new 'Icons' paintings, embellished with medieval Cyrillic calligraphy, enigmatic crosses and other invented symbols of devotion. 'Punk's Not Dead' began with a January residency at Honor Fraser, where Tolokonnikova gave an earsplitting performance as part of the group Pussy Riot Siberia. Her musical instruments were aluminum riot shields that she 'played' by scratching them with brass knuckles and other tools and carving them with hearts and anarchy signs. The riot shields now hang in the gallery like a vandalized series by Donald Judd. The gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, who gave her a pop-up show in 2023, said he is not surprised that Tolokonnikova is increasingly using galleries and museums as a media platform. 'From the very beginning she's been an artist,' he said. 'When Pussy Riot did their famous performance at the Moscow cathedral, they were not a group of trained musicians but really performance artists.' Now, he added, 'you have this integration of performance, art, activism and this charismatic persona — she wraps it all together.' Still, it hasn't been easy for Tolokonnikova to find venues for her art. 'Someone told me the art world is harder to navigate than Russian jail,' she said, smiling at the thought. But so far, she said, 'having people tell me no or ghosting me is annoying' but nothing like having 'a squad of riot police invade your exhibit.' A more substantial challenge: bringing something of the live-wire intensity of street performance into the museum world. 'It's much more explosive and abrasive to perform something for 40 seconds, when you have to deliver a message before you're dragged by the feet by the police,' she acknowledged. 'But after I got out of jail it became almost impossible for me to make work in the same way because I was under police surveillance 24-7 and my phone was tapped. 'I didn't want to get killed,' she added, 'so I was pushed into the studio work.' She said she's learning from artists like Abramovic, Valie Export and Yoko Ono, who have made provocative work within safe spaces. She also speaks admiringly of the 'total installations' of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, who would go so far as to recreate grimy Soviet-era apartments in the name of art. Her first solo gallery show, at Deitch's gallery in 2023, featured the multipart project, 'Putin's Ashes.' Outraged by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, she invited women who shared her anger — Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian — to join her in the desert for a ritualistic burning of a portrait of the Russian president. At the end of the performance, documented in a short film, she deposited the ashes into glass vials. Deitch showed both the film and vials, which she had shrouded, using her prison-era sewing skills, in fake fur. The exhibition prompted the Russian government to file a new criminal charge against her for insulting religious believers; placement on a 'most wanted criminals' list and a warrant for her 'arrest in absentia' followed. 'My job for quite a while, the last 15 years of my activism, is to hurt Vladimir Putin as much as I humanly can,' she told MSNBC'S Lawrence O'Donnell, 'and the instrument of my war is my art. We know that he's incredibly superstitious, so he might actually be afraid.' When 'Putin's Ashes' traveled to a gallery in Santa Fe, she experimented with recreating some elements of a Russian prison cell and hung out there for a while on opening night, using a homemade shiv to carve some graffiti into a wooden table. As an introvert, albeit one with exhibitionist tendencies, she said she found it a convenient way to avoid small talk with the crowd. In her MOCA cell she will be installing some drawings made by Russian political prisoners, including Valeria Zotova, who is serving a six-year prison sentence after being accused of planning a terrorist attack. Tolokonnikova will also play a keyboard and other instruments, layered with audio tracks from actual prisons. 'The music is going to be at times very gentle and beautiful and reminiscent of my childhood,' she said, explaining that she will sing lullabies that remind her of her mother, who died last summer in Russia. At other times, 'there are going to be screams of pain, or screams of rage, screams of power.' She is rehearsing the music, but not training physically, for the project. 'It's not as strict as Marina's performance,' she said, referring to Abramovic's physically punishing 2010 durational work, 'The Artist Is Present,' at the Museum of Modern Art. 'It's not about putting physical constraints on my body — I've done that enough in an actual prison environment. Yes, I can go without food for 10 days,' she said. 'To repeat it in a museum environment to me would almost look like a gimmick. What's interesting to me is to be this living and breathing heart of the installation.'
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘I was thrilled when they put me in solitary': Pussy Riot's Nadya on Putin, joining OnlyFans and turning her prison cell into art
Ten minutes into our interview, Nadya Tolokonnikova ducks to fetch a piece of paper from the floor and I find myself looking at something unexpected behind her. Next to a double bed, two crucifixes hang on the wall. Given the Siberia-born artist is best known for a performance piece that so offended the head of the Russian Orthodox church that he called it blasphemy, the discovery of such devotional regalia comes as a surprise. It certainly doesn't suggest 'religious hatred', which is what a Moscow court said in 2012 motivated Tolokonnikova's group Pussy Riot to perform a 'punk prayer' in the city's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, before sentencing her to two years imprisonment. Nor does it smack of someone bent on hurting the 'religious feelings of believers' – the charge under which Tolokonnikova was sentenced again two years ago, this time in absentia, and put on Russia's wanted list. Famous for performing in garishly coloured balaclavas, Pussy Riot appeared unmasked in court in 2012 – which turned the photogenic Tolokonnikova into the most globally recognisable face of a wave of protests against the then Russian PM Vladimir Putin. But looking at those bedside crosses, and at her new exhibition in Berlin, you wonder if everyone got the wrong end of the stick. Part of the German capital's gallery weekend, her solo show Wanted at Galerie Nagel Draxler doesn't just feature a replica of her former prison cell and a screening of the Putin's Ashes performance that led to her wanted status, but also Tolokonnikova's own paintings of religious icons. She uses tasteful old Slavic calligraphy techniques – while putting the icons in Pussy Riot ski masks. 'I don't have any hatred of the Orthodox church,' says the 35-year-old, who prefers her location not to be disclosed, as she speaks to me over Zoom. 'I don't like the corrupt elements, but it is a part of the heritage our country can actually be proud of.' She pauses. 'That was something very difficult to communicate to the judge, who didn't want to listen.' The Punk Prayer electrified Europe and beyond. Balaclavas appeared in Hollywood films and on the runway at New York fashion week. 'Progress is not guaranteed / I say Pussy Riot's what we need', sang American singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis. 'Pussy Riot are a reminder that revolution always begins in culture,' the Guardian pronounced. But the revolution never came. Pussy Riot's protest marked a genuine moment of weakness in Putin's system, but their boldness may have inadvertently led the world to view Russian society as more courageous and determined than was the case. 'I think it's awesome that you guys romanticised Russian society,' says Tolokonnikova, with a cheerfulness that teeters on sarcasm. 'The fact that you saw it as strong may have been a factor in it believing it actually was.' The last time she spoke to the Guardian, Tolokonnikova expressed hope that opposition leader Alexei Navalny could one day become a 'worthy successor' to Putin. But Navalny, who supported Pussy Riot's cause after initially dismissing them as 'silly girls', died in prison in February last year. 'Maybe one day we'll believe in someone as much as I believed in Navalny,' she says. 'But not now.' What, amid all these devastating turns, does she find to draw hope from? In her 2018 book Read and Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, Tolokonnikova wrote: 'Art is capable of giving hope and meaning to those who are desperate.' But looking at her recent artistic output, you have to squint hard to detect much light. The Berlin exhibition is inspired by her reading of the work of the US clinical psychologist and trauma specialist Peter A Levine, who suggests patients close their eyes and revisit their traumas – while trying to relate different bodily experiences to them. So Tolokonnikova chose to build a replica of the isolation cell she was transferred to after going on hunger strike in 2013, leaving the open wards where she spent most of her incarceration. 'I was thrilled when I was put in that cell,' she says. 'The Russian system of penal colonies still resembles the gulag: people put in barracks without any personal space. So we only could dream about a personal cell.' Alongside this duplicate cell, other things will bring Tolokonnikova's time there alive: her prison badge, the pay stubs for the paltry sums she received for her labour, and drawings sent to her by her young daughter. There will also be a print-out of the open letter in which she announced her hunger strike in protest at the 'slavery-like conditions'. It was smuggled out of jail by her ex-husband, the artist and activist Peter Verzilov, and led to an investigation, followed by the conviction of a member of the prison administration. It remains a work of enormous power. 'It has been a year since I arrived at Penal Colony No 14 in the Mordovian village of Parts,' she wrote. 'As the prisoner saying goes, 'Those who never did time in Mordovia never did time at all.' I started hearing about Mordovian prison colonies while I was still being held at Pre-Trial Detention Centre No 6 in Moscow. They have the highest levels of security, the longest workdays, and the most flagrant rights violation. When they send you off to Mordovia, it is as though you're headed to the scaffold.' But there is an air of cynicism, even bitterness, to some of the new works. Mounted on the gallery walls are DIY 'Molotov kits' that look like bottles of perfume. Shining in neon hues that echo Pussy Riot balaclavas, they seem to be making a provocative comment about the commodification of protest culture, something she was such a thrillingly pivotal part of. She does not hide her disillusionment. 'I'm sad,' she says. 'Ever since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started I feel … defeated. I still do what I do. I still believe in the power of art. But these days, I feel like the musician from the movie Titanic, who was playing the violin. He can't stop the ship from sinking, but he can lift the spirits of people while they are going down.' Talking of commodification, in her book Tolokonnikova insists Pussy Riot 'don't want to live in a world where everyone is for sale and nothing is for the public good'. But in 2021, she started an account on OnlyFans, the online platform where creators offer adult content to paying subscribers. She says that she also posts erotic self-portraits on her Instagram channel, and those are 'for the public good'. And the stuff on OnlyFans? 'Well, I really enjoy it. It arouses me. And it's honest work. One needs to eat and pay the bills and pay for the kids' education and that's how I do it. Political art is not a good business strategy.' She catches herself and says: 'I wouldn't want this article to be called, 'Nadya doesn't have hope any more.' If I didn't have hope any more, I wouldn't keep going, right?' She points to Mediazona, the independent news outlet she set up with Pussy Riot co-founders and the journalist Sergei Smirnov in 2014. Initially focused on Russian prison conditions, it has become one of the most-cited Russian-language media companies since the start of the Ukraine war, tracking Russian military deaths and alleging abuse of Ukrainian PoWs. Its staff recently said it was on the verge of collapse, unable to pull in enough crowdfunding revenue since Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia. 'I do still have hope,' she says. 'It's just not revolution. It's more subtle and it's more long-term.' Then she gets up to fetch one of those crucifixes and hold it to the camera. Pasted on the cross is a collage of naked women in pornographic poses, a riot of female genitalia. Suddenly the old Tolokonnikova seems not so far away. Wanted is at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, until 6 June. On 3 May, Nadya Tolokonnikova is talking to artist Anne Imhof and curator Klaus Biesenbach at the Neue Nationalgalerie
