When Nadya Tolokonnikova and her bandmates made the sign of the cross at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012, they embodied their faith in dissent as much as any relic inside the Orthodox church. Pussy Riot, a group of young women protesting the Kremlin’s authoritarianism, got an impressive 40 seconds deep into their performance of Punk Prayer (also known as Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!) before getting shut down. The song was a call to the Virgin Mary to join the band as a feminist, as well as a response to the ban on displaying gay pride and the Russian Orthodox Church’s corruption in supporting President Vladimir Putin. Pussy Riot became an emblem of Russia’s free-speech resistance, a dangerous movement which earned several of its performers a two-year prison sentence after being charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
Punk Prayer wasn’t Nadya Tolokonnikova’s first act of artistic protest. Born in the industrial city of Norilsk, she co-founded the collective Voina as a 17-year-old philosophy student at Moscow State University; Tolokonnikova and member Yekaterina Samutsevich went on to start Pussy Riot. Part of the band’s ethos is that anyone can be in it; all it takes is a balaclava and a fear of acquiescence. Though Pussy Riot takes the form of a traditional punk band, one in line with 1990s Riot Grrrl groups and the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, the stylings of their performances intersect with visual artists’, from Judy Chicago’s colored smoke to the Guerilla Girls’ anonymous army against sexism and discrimination and the Situationist International’s deployment of the spectacle in the battle against capitalism. It’s punk to be organized, Nadya tells me. The action should be very well organized and should produce clear, high-quality images and video. Revolution can also begin anywhere, anytime: As laid out in her 2018 book, Read & Riot – A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, the rules for upheaval include “Commit an Art Crime” (#5), though many of Pussy Riot’s surprise public actions shine as examples of decree #4: “Make Your Government Shit Its Pants.”
Tolokonnikova spent two years in the IK-14 women’s penal colony for her “hooliganism,” during which, between her forced labor of sewing military uniforms, she went on a hunger strike to protest the brutal living and working conditions and began exchanging letters with philosopher Slavoj Žižek when she was finally awarded her mail. “All of our activity is a quest for miracles,” she wrote to him from her cell. “It may sound crazy,” Žižek responded in a letter of his own, “but although I am an atheist, you are in my prayers.”1
After her release, Tolokonnikova’s stunts caused the Russian Ministry of Justice to classify her as a “foreign agent”; in 2023, her film Putin’s Ashes centered on burning a portrait of her subject, put her atop Russia’s list of most-wanted criminals. It featured a marabou-fur trimmed board with a cartoonish red emergency knob. “This button neutralizes Vladimir Putin =^•^=,” it warns us. She was arrested in absentia, effectively preventing her return to her home country.
Tolokonnikova and Pussy Riot follow a distinct history of Russian feminist activism in the avant-garde, where figures such as Aleksandra Kollontai, founder of the Zhenotdel (Women’s Department) of the Bolshevik Party, led women in Muslim-majority USSR states in controversial “de-veiling” group actions in public squares and convinced the Party to legalize abortion in Russia, the first country to do so, in 1920. She’s continued to re-create her prison cell as art therapy, framing the installations as “renegotiating her trauma.” This renegotiation is also visible in her reinterpretation of Christian Orthodox iconography and her re-applications of her sewing skills. The iteration of Putin’s Ashes at Container in Santa Fe in 2023 expanded cinema into a larger installation with a plywood rendition of her penal colony cell. In the tradition of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s “total installations,” she turned the concepts of privacy and solitude inside out in the aftermath of the USSR’s dissolution.
In June 2025, Tolokonnikova’s work POLICE STATE was presented at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s
(MOCA) warehouse. Tolokonnikova confined herself again within a prison of her own making, a corrugated metal shack, for over a week, surrounded by her familiar images of power sources: a neon, three-bar Russian Orthodox cross; banners made of bedsheets made by the forced labor in Belarusian prisons printed with messages such as “punk’s not dead,” whipped around by the blast of industrial fans. Her cell opened up the machinations of surveillance to create a panopticon: A live feed of the artist, exposed from a few feet away, was screened with archival video from Russian prisons. Visitors who peered into the cell’s eye slots were now security guards too. Vintage gumball machines offered flavors of poison such as gelsemium, ricin, and Novichok. Church pews provided seating. Inside, Nadya returned to the sewing machine, surrounded by artwork submitted by Russian, American, and Belarusian political prisoners, occasionally adjusting the soundtrack of ghostly hymns, sudden clatters, and Russian lullabies and prayers.
POLICE STATE’s run was interrupted by the protests against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) workplace raids on Hispanic communities, leading to individuals’ arrest without due process, state-sanctioned kidnappings of people who had been suspected of violating immigration laws. Militia tanks filled the streets of Los Angeles seemingly overnight, and citizens crowded the streets surrounding city hall—streets which also neighbored MOCA, animating the work’s concepts right outside the museum’s walls. MOCA did close, but the artist stayed inside her cell, broadcasting the sounds of the streets with her own heartbeat to the empty warehouse. By this point, Pussy Riot—and Tolokonnikova—had experienced so many ruptures in performance, only pausing, not stopping: The 2024 installation Pussy Riot Sex Dolls was violated in the chapel of the Holy Virgin, a secular space within the OK Linz Museum in Austria, where discarded sex dolls became non-sentient members of Pussy Riot, dressed in their signature balaclavas and platform boots. The chapel’s glass was replaced, and the show reopened. Tolokonnikova’s 2025 exhibition Punk’s Not Dead at Honor Fraser gallery was cut short by the fires that shut down most of Los Angeles in January; the band Pussy Riot Siberia’s performances picked up again later. One of Tolokonnikova’s ongoing projects is co-founding MediaZona, an underground independent news service in Russia, which reports on news often censored by state media. “Durational performance is a scary thing to step into: once you said you’re going to show up, you can’t just leave simply because the National Guard had a whim to occupy the city, so my choice was to stay and continue doing my job as an artist.”
In Tolokonnikova’s “quest for miracles,” her continuous output is something of a miracle of its own. She is safe. “I think the reason why I got released and partly why I’m still alive is because people were talking about the Pussy Riot case,” she said in a panel discussion at the closing of POLICE STATE. It’s true; media attention can sometimes overturn activists’ fates. Performing such feats in Russia today is particularly meaningful, especially since she uses her own body as a site of revolution and resistance, vulnerability underlined by her and Pussy Riot’s costumes of modest dresses with lace cuffs and collars, feminine shifts and tights, rainbow-hued balaclavas, school-uniform pinafores, and negligees. “Sometimes, it’s just cute little things like flowers carved on the shields, because I want to bring a part of me that is not just always rough but also sometimes feminine and cute. I think cuteness and kindness will save the world,”2 Tolokonnikova explains in her adornments. Global attention might provide an audience’s instinctive protection from authoritarian grasp but cover from it might only be as strong as an eggshell, not a suit of armor. In the same panel, she brought up the media scrutiny in the case of her friend the activist Alexei Navalny, who gained worldwide attention as an opponent to Putin and recently died in prison. “Sometimes, it doesn’t work. It’s not fully magic.”
1 Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj (London: Verso Books, 2014).
2 SPIN magazine, January 2025. https://www.spin. com/2025/01/pussy-riot-siberia-wants-you-to-remember-that-punks-not-dead/.