Nadya Tolokonnikova: ‘We Aren’t Dead Yet’

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The co-founder of Pussy Riot is staging a takeover of Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie on the back of her first museum show, RAGE, at OK Linz in Austria. Once suspicious of institutions, Tolokonnikova has embraced them. But she's not ready for Pussy Riot shows to be described as retrospectives.

Led by Nadya Tolokonnikova, 50 members of activist art group Pussy Riot will give a performance titled RAGE at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie tonight at 8.15pm local time. It will include a smoke sculpture and the live music performance PUSSY RIOT—SIBERIA, in which Tolokonnikova seeks to 'produce a tower of sound as black and brutal as Norilsk, the Siberian city where I grew up. A tower of sound to reach up into the sky and annihilate the ills of the world.' The museum's director, Klaus Biesenbach, has been promoting the show on his Instagram, adding art world clout to the group's raw appeal. It's an odd pairing, indicative of how much Pussy Riot, and Tolokonnikova, have evolved over the past 13 years.

Pussy Riot was founded by Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich in 2011, breaking away from Voina—a Russian performance art protest group whose activities included throwing live cats over the counters at McDonald's restaurants, tipping cop cars, and having sex at Moscow's museum of biology—to 'do something a bit more feminist-leaning'.

Most famously, on 21 February 2012, five members of Pussy Riot staged a punk rock performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, which they turned into a music video titled 'Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!' Tolokonnikova and Maria 'Masha' Alyokhina were arrested and served almost two years in prison for 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred'.

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Tolokonnikova has been busy in the years since, co-founding independent news outlet Mediazona with Alyokhina, publishing the book Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism (2018), and raising U.S. $7 million to aid Ukraine through the sale of NFTs.

In 2022, Pussy Riot created Putin's Ashes, a video performance in which Tolokonnikova and 11 other women torched a portrait of Putin and collected the ashes in small glass jars. The work was shown at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles in 2023, and was later acquired by the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

In March 2023, Russia's Interior Ministry put Tolokonnikova on their wanted list—reportedly a response to Putin's Ashes—and in November she was arrested in absentia. Despite the increased pressure from the Kremlin, she developed the exhibition RAGE (21 June–20 October 2024), which recently opened at OK Linz.

The exhibition includes Putin's Ashes (2022), as well as a replica of her prison cell, shivs in faux fur frames, and used sex dolls—chosen for their inability to voice consent—dressed as Pussy Riot members. The work Damocles Blade (2024), a huge knife suspended from the ceiling, symbolic of the enmity often engendered by those in power, is surrounded by banners that repeat the phrase 'love is stronger than death.'

SG: You launched your first museum show at OK Linz last month. What was that experience like?

NT: My work used to always be on the street—actions that resulted in arrest or physical violence, so working with a supportive museum was much better. I love working on the street because there are no invisible censors, it's only the laws of physics that can limit you—can we jump over that fence, can we sneak into that fashion show, can we light these flares. But in a museum or gallery you face this new enemy—one of self censorship and fear in curation. However this was not the case with the director, Alfred Weidinger, and curators Michaela Seiser and Julia Staudach, who actually encouraged me to push harder, to lean into my message.

When you tell most people that you need to source used (very importantly used) sex dolls, which have the weight and fragility of a human body, to dress them and adorn them in collaboration with the infamous drag artist Niohuru X and ship them across the world, you'd maybe expect some pushback. We even considered compromising the number of these sex doll Pussy Riot members, from three to one, to save costs on shipping, but the curators really stood strong. They said it was very important to bring them.

The team at OK Linz also did amazing work with the site specific installations. At one point we decided the prison cell was too clean; it needed dirt and filth. Before we knew it, the whole crew was brewing and spilling coffee and rolling cigarettes on the furniture, tracking dirt in. It very quickly hit a level of 'lived in' grime that you cannot simply fake. This reminded me of an early Voina action, where we cooked soup on police cars, or of the wake action in the subway—these dirty, organic, and human moments that have existed in my art from the early days, through to Pussy Riot actions as well.

SG: What range of responses have you received to the show? How well does rage inhabit an institution like OK Linz?

NT:

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It was interesting to work with Austrian and German-speaking press. They seem to have different priorities or kinks than other Western press. They loved the sex dolls and do not shy away from sexuality. Lots of their questions were about this side of my life and practice.

I think the angry locals, basically Austrian gopniks who hang out in the park and drink beers—made some rude comments about the sex dolls in the chapel, spitting on the ground we walked on, most likely accusing us of blasphemy of some sort. It's nothing new to me—blasphemy, hooliganism, terrorist—these tired phrases of critics. It's the same level of intellectual critique from the local drunks and the highest office of the Kremlin.

The performance at the opening was well received; it was loud, and raw. People who love Pussy Riot love the idea of Pussy Riot; they don't necessarily love me. But I think I tap into something primal when I'm performing—a very universal rage that we can all relate to. And people know my story and sacrifices—I haven't really shown these so personally before. In the prison cell we built [at OK Linz], I included a crayon drawing of a hippo from my daughter. She sent it to me in prison when she was four years old. I was able to open up a bit more personally about how this affected me and my life—a love-hate grappling with identity, homeland, and exile.

SG: You first performed the live music piece PUSSY RIOT—SIBERIA, the one you performed at the OK Linz opening, at a benefit event for the American Folk Art Museum in New York earlier this year. Does it function more like performance art or a punk rock show?

NT: The art world seems to foster longer and more in-depth conversations and themes than the music world—so in that sense it is purely for the art world. There is a liminal space between genres, and we exist there, but the second you get to ticket sales, streaming numbers, and hot dogs and beer at the festival concession stand, you lose some of the sanctity of it.

Neue Nationalgalerie's Klaus Biesenbach heard about what we did in Linz and wanted to give us a platform in Berlin. We are expecting many, many people and will be dominating the space with smoke, women in ski masks, and raw noise.

SG: Masha Alyokhina, with whom you performed Punk Prayer at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 2012, has been touring the exhibition Velvet Terrorism, which showed first in Iceland, Denmark, and then Canada. As one of the founders of Pussy Riot, how do you feel about these separate exhibitions?

NT:

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Much like my foremothers, Judy Chicago, Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, and Marina Abramović, it is important to me to dominate the space with femininity and strength. Each art venue is a new challenge on how to do this creatively and to do it with grace and beauty as well. I've been known for goofy DIY things like handmade balaclavas, but my more recent work is more refined, more intentional, more coordinated—as I take more seriously and gravely the threats we are facing in the world. You can see this in Putin's Ashes—the women, from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, are in more of a serious procession, rather than a punk chaos of colours. It's a reflection of how sad and serious this war, and this situation is. It wouldn't feel right to be using all the pop colours.

I was able to see the exhibition at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), and of course any time you see your work in a museum setting that is cool. When Kat and I started Pussy Riot we never imagined something like this. In fact, with our earlier group, Voina, we were explicitly against art institutions—the idea of fancy wine and cheese openings made us sick. We thought art needed to confront social issues with much more urgency. But in that sense it is nice to see curators and directors taking us seriously, and giving us a platform—and at the very least, not being afraid of the implications of working with Russian dissident artists.

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I think at some point press started calling that show a retrospective, which wasn't something Masha or anyone else did. It's a little silly—we're in our 30s; we aren't dead or assassinated yet. It makes me wonder if people love and identify with the mythology and martyrdom of our cause more so than our ongoing art and actionism.

As an example, in 2022, with a group of others including my now partner John Caldwell, we used digital art to raise millions of dollars to support Ukraine in the first week of the full-scale invasion. I'm more proud of this than any bullshit labels like 'retrospective' or words of art critics who may treasure what we did in 2012, but aren't brave enough to do anything meaningful or truly progressive now.

SG: I spoke to Masha shortly after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died, hoping to better understand her courage, and your courage, and the courage of Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalnaya. What have you found most effective in building your own bravery, and inspiring it in others?

NT: I let myself feel sad for about 24 hours. My daughter came into my room to tell me the news—we both cried and cried. But then I needed to do something. It's my coping mechanism. We went to the Russian embassy in Berlin and brought banners—MURDERERS—along with [Pussy Riot member] Lucy Shtein and [Russian opposition politician] Lyubov Sobol.

I spoke to the absurdity of not returning his body to his mother, when in fact this offended my religious feelings, the crime I was sentenced with. I'll continue to champion Alexei and Yulia's message and hope—they gave us this gift, and we owe it to keep inspiring others, inside and outside of Russia, to fight Putin, to support Ukraine, to not give up.

Alexei of course did not give up. The words repeated over and over on the banners in Linz and now at Neue Nationalgalerie are a play on his 'love is stronger than fear', but [instead,] 'love is stronger than death'. —[O]

Main image: Nadya Tolokonnikova at the exhibition RAGE, OK Linz, Linz (21 June 2024–20 October 2024). Courtesy the artist and OK Linz. Photo: Manuel Carreon Lopez.