Nadya Tolokonnikova isn’t one to dither. Known best as a co-founder of Pussy Riot, she has—after being released from prison, where she was sentenced to two years on charges of “hooliganism” due to her part in Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” protest at a Moscow cathedral—founded a nonprofit to track human-rights abuses in Russia’s prisons; founded an independent Russian news organization, Mediazona, later demonized by Vladimir Putin’s administration as a “foreign agent”; designed an (ongoing) clothing and accessories collection; written an inspirational and righteous autobiography and guide to activism; become something of a pop star; and married a thought leader in the Web3 space.
More recently, though—betwixt and between continued political actions—Tolokonnikova has been prioritizing the art practice that’s at the root of virtually everything she’s done. “Rage,” the first museum show of her contemporary visual and performance work, opens tomorrow at OK Linz, a contemporary art space in Linz, Austria. (It’s on through October 20.)
The exhibition, curated by Michaela Seiser and Julia Staudach, unfolds over two floors and includes 11 works in Tolokonnikova’s Icons series of acrylic calligraphy on canvas; six works in her Dark Matter series, which incorporates calligraphy and symbols loosely based on the orthodox cross; her prison archive; a video archive of Pussy Riot actions including “Punk Prayer”; a very recent work involving reclaimed sex dolls; a replica of her Siberian prison cell; and five art films—including, perhaps most notably, “Putin’s Ashes,” which debuted last year at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, was just acquired for the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and is making its European debut at OK Linz.
The first room, “Rage Chapel,” features the works from the Icons series—among them, the triptych My Motherland Loves Me and I Love My Motherland, a reference to both Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me and Oleg Kulik’s I Bite America and America Bites Me—as well as Pussy Riot’s 2014 action at the Sochi Olympics, “Putin Will Teach You How to Love the Motherland,” which saw Tolokonnikova and her fellow performers beaten, whipped, and thrown to the ground by Cossack militia. The second room is centered around “Putin’s Ashes,” an installation based on a 2022 performance in an anonymous location which featured 12 Pussy Riot participants from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus burning a 10-foot-tall portrait of Vladimir Putin, with the ashes later bottled and labeled. Hanging above the staircase leading to the second floor is a monumental engraved knife, Damocles Sword, along with three tall velvet banners, with Tolokonnikova’s calligraphy repeating a kind of incantation: “Love is stronger than death.” (Another triptych, Love Is Stronger Than Fear, is dedicated to Tolokonnikova’s friend and colleague Alexey Navalny, who was murdered in a Russian penal colony in February.)
The second floor features the replica of Tolokonnikova’s cell, along with archival documents from her jail time, the artist’s open letter from jail while on a hunger strike in 2012, a wall of prison shivs (part of her Knife Play series), and Pussy Riot’s video works.
We sat down with the artist, activist, writer, polymath, and wunderkind the morning after a recent performance—the premiere of a new nine-part Pussy Riot audio work, Siberia, at a benefit for the American Folk Art Museum, where David Byrne also presented her with the museum’s Dynamic Achievement in the Arts award—to talk about art, rage, the Virgin Mary, reproductive rights, religion, Taylor Swift, and so much more.
Vogue: When did you first become conscious of art? When did you discover it, and when did you commit yourself to it?
Nadya Tolokonnikova: There was a moment when I was 14 or 15 when this group of artists came to a contemporary art festival that was taking place, surprisingly, in my hometown of Norilsk, Siberia—it’s very far, far north, and it’s just so poisoned, so depressing. I mean, this sort of thing never happened. It’s a weird destiny, I feel—it happened because of the sister of an oligarch who practically owned the city. The oligarch himself was not a very bright or delightful person, just a normal Putin oligarch wasting his life, but his sister is very bright, and dedicated to educating others. But this festival is where I encountered Dmitri Prigov, this poet and sculptor and musician and painter—he himself would always try to avoid any definition of who he is. What really struck me was a video piece of his where he hugs a cat, he pets the cat, and he asks the cat to say Russia. And the whole piece, 10 or 15 minutes, he just tries to convince the cat to say Russia—“Kitty, darling, please say Russia.” And I found it captivating, and just looked at it for hours and hours on repeat. My friends were like, “Why do you keep staring at this?” It was a moment of truth for me, because I realized that there was something in it—the way he was interacting with the political field, but also making it very funny, but also serious. It was something that I just took very close to my heart. I guess it’s in the depths of everything that I do today. After that he gave a little talk, which was nice, and then went into a performance where he lost everyone in the audience except me—I was just jumping up and down and banging my head against the walls. I realized, Oh—this is the way to live. He read a piece of poetry from Alexander Pushkin. You know him?
Yeah—at one time in my life his work was very close to my heart.
Really? I hated him, because he was imposed on me as the greatest poet, the greatest cultural phenomenon of Russian literature. We were supposed to pray to him, bow down to him, learn his poetry, and I hated him. But Prigov read him in the manner of a Christian prayer, and then in the manner of a Buddhist mantra, and then in the way an Islamic imam would sing his prayer. He read the same piece that every Russian school kid would know—the most known piece of Russian literature—and suddenly it was like, holy shit. He took the text that was watered down into total nothingness and elevated it with just one performative gesture so it has meaning and sense again, and you can feel that it’s radical again. You can rethink the whole heritage of Pushkin once again.
What about making your own art? Do you consider your activism or your protesting to be a kind of art, or an instrument of social change? Did you ever have a phase when you were like, I want to be an artist and I want to draw, I want to paint…?
Ever since I encountered Prigov and some other people who I saw at the festival, it became fairly clear to me that I wanted to be an artist because this is the way I want to live life. I don’t want to live life in a straight way; I would rather be living with no money at all. From that moment, I dedicated myself to figuring it out. I came to Moscow and started looking for people with whom I could create art. I saw drawing as kind of an old-fashioned art—I loved text, writing, and I really loved performance art, but I didn’t really know exactly how I could pursue that in a meaningful way, so I went off to study philosophy [at Moscow State University] for six months, and then I co-founded my first art collective when I was 17: I found this group of people with whom we created Voina, which is “war” in Russian. It was a war against the political reality, and against cultural institutions that are rigid and boring and stagnant.
You asked me if we considered it art, or activism, or protest. For me, art and politics are really inseparable. I don’t think that every artist has to be political, but I think they should understand the political context in which they work. Even if they do apolitical work, they should realize that that’s also a political statement—but of course they can choose to be apolitical. We did stuff like projecting a giant skull and bones, 40 by 40 meters, on the building of the Parliament of Russia at night—and then we jumped over a six-meter-high fence, ran through the territory, and escaped. The idea was to show people that even a group of 10 can create this kind of action and penetrate something that seems impenetrable. So it was, yes, political—but more a metaphor to tell people that power structures are actually much more fragile than the way in which they present themselves.
In 2011, me and my friend Kat, who also participated in Voina, created a kind of a militant feminist faction of Voina, and we did some actions with that, and it’s from this that Pussy Riot was born. We decided to completely hide our faces because we wanted to create an illusion that there were a lot of different collectives working in Russia, making similar actions. And we were able to disguise our identity until we got sent to jail; when you’re in court, obviously your identity is revealed.
When you created Pussy Riot, you seem to have moved your art forward in a very contemporary way—not just with the things that you did, but with what you continue to do now by working within the world of communications and media relations, marketing, propaganda. The brand of Pussy Riot, if you will, is something that’s at once shocking and attractive and forward-leaning and kind of dangerous in a sort of mainstream media way—all of which, of course, makes it more attractive for a certain kind of person.
Oh, yeah—everyone really gets off when old people from NPR say “Pussy Riot.”
Something like your work “Putin’s Ashes” is both a provocation, a striking concept and group performance, and an exquisitely produced video—all of which is kind of dancing around the subject matter itself.
I was trying to solve a few things with this piece, besides just manifesting, you know, the thing that we all think about, but not everyone wants to [say] out loud—well, I’ll say it: Putin’s death. After we performed and filmed the piece, we collected Putin’s ashes and put them in little vials—little bottles that I later put into these sculptural collages. The question is really: How do you bring performance art into the setting of a museum or a gallery? And this is one of the answers. Is it a perfect answer? I don’t know—art is always a process. But this was an attempt.
You have a complicated relationship with your homeland: there seems to be hatred, rage—and given the experiences that you’ve had, I think I can understand the hatred and the rage. But there’s also what seems like love, and attachment, and care and concern for Russia. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, it’s dark matter. I love my motherland, and my motherland loves me, but it’s a very abusive relationship, at least from the side of my motherland. I wouldn’t say hatred, though. I have hatred towards Putin and people who support Putin, and to people who go to war against Ukraine, but they’re not everything that I saw while I was living in Russia. I also remember those people who dreamed about a different kind of Russia: a democratic, free, and peaceful neighbor.
When I was growing up in the ’90s, I was thinking that Russia would become a part of the European Union one day. As a child, I remember getting my first European visa in 1998, and thinking that would be the last one because the logical way of development would be that then Russia would become part of Europe, which obviously did not happen. So, it’s complicated: there is hope, there is pain, and there is rage. I really love rage, because when you encounter something bad, or depressing—for example, the death of your colleague and friend Alexei Navalny—you have two choices: to get down into deep, deep depression, or to allow yourself to experience rage. Rage has always given me a lot of energy to produce art, and hopefully—it’s subjective, obviously—but I think my best art would always come out of rage. It’s therapeutic.
The Linz exhibition also has a Rage Chapel. The church has obviously been…I don’t know if it’s the church, or religion in general, but it’s obviously central to almost everything you’ve done; the Punk Prayer, of course, took place in a cathedral.
Yes—there’s also another chapel at the entrance of the museum, just outside, with small, beautiful icons of the Virgin Mary on the ceiling, where we have three Pussy Riot sex dolls—used sex dolls. It’s important for me to buy sex dolls that have already been part of an encounter that I’m looking at as kind of unpleasant, because just as a sex doll cannot talk, she cannot voice her consent. But I rescued these sex dolls: I found them on Facebook ads and forums and Craigslist postings, and we turned them into Pussy Riot characters—dominatrices with all sorts of custom weapons. We gave them an internal structure, a skeleton, and turned them into sculptures that are exhibited in the chapel.
As for the religion question, though: When I was little, my dad told me once that the ultimate job of an artist is to create their own religion. I took that very seriously, and I think that's what I’ve been doing ever since. That’s why you see these symbols, or runes, if you wish, that I'm creating. But instead of using those that were already created by different religions, I’m creating my own symbols, my own chapels, and I guess—
It summons an amazing power, doesn’t it? Just using the symbol is automatically summoning a kind of totem, an icon that people bring assumptions to, and opinions, and stereotypes, hopes, prayers, wishes, prejudices…
I’m really, really deeply invested in studying religion and iconography, and yeah, I’ve been obsessed with the Virgin Mary for a second. I believe that she’s one of the biggest feminists, and I just like to question the whole thing about one of the biggest religions in the world being based on the story of rape—she was basically raped by the Holy Spirit—and I’d really just like to talk to her as a person, as a woman just like me. Did she give her consent to have sex with the Holy Spirit? Did she actually want to have the baby? And why is her voice not written in the New Testament? I feel like if she was hanging out here today, she’d become another member of Pussy Riot.
But I’m not a religious person by any normal definition—I’m more taking bits and pieces that I find attractive and that I love and can relate to. Religious people talk about the fear of God, which is absurd to me. Why would I have to fear God? I understand how I can love God, but not fear God.
We’re obviously living in this just insane time—with what’s going on in Russia, in Ukraine; with Putin and with Trump; with our Supreme Court and Justices Alito and Thomas. But it’s not just your country and my country, it’s the rest of the world: Sudan, South America. It’s an endless list.
That’s what I call the new Dark Ages—this is the topic of this Dark Matter series.
You’ve been able to find a way to be creative, to not just throw in the towel and give in to despair—is there any advice you have for people trying to navigate this world?
I love what Jenny Holzer said in a recent New York Times article about her: she said, “Optimism is not my specialty.” I was reading just another report on the climate catastrophe this morning—you know: Wake up, read about terrible things that are going to happen with the planet we live on—and I was thinking that maybe the whole idea of progress was wrong. We were expecting things to get better, and they’re just getting gradually worse and worse and worse. I’ve found that art happens to be a good therapeutic method. I don’t really think it’s going to save the world—it can make changes in some people’s minds, but others just won’t give a fuck about it.
What about political action? Everybody has a choice in what they can do: Some choose art, others politics and policy, academia, protest and political action…
I think whatever speaks to you. Whatever you have, whatever you enjoy doing—or at least whatever saves you from ultimate despair. This is the place I’m at right now; joy is long gone.
I’m not sure if you know about the tennis player Arthur Ashe—he was one of the first Black tennis players to dominate the pro game in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and had this amazing way of just thinking differently and expressing himself in amazing ways. He encouraged people who wanted to make a difference to “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”
Brilliant. But also, of course, aside from all our metaphysical bullshit, just vote.
Yeah.
It’s a very real thing that everyone can do—just vote for democracy.
The voting thing is actually a bit of a problem at the moment, because there’s a lot of young people in US who are like, “Biden doesn’t speak to me, so I’m not going to vote.” My point being that not voting—when just voting can mean saving democracy itself—isn’t always apolitical.
I really loved what Navalny proposed for a few elections in Russia. He called it Smart Vote, and it was actually very simple: Vote for anyone who’s not Putin. People would be like, Why would I vote for this corrupt clown who Putin installed to run against him [to ensure Putin wins]? But Navalny reminded us: You don’t have to love that guy, or that woman—just push the button and get rid of Putin.
I generally don’t really involve myself much with American politics because I am laser-focused on what happens in Russia, what happens in Ukraine, but reproductive rights is something that I’m deeply passionate about. I feel like it transcends all the nation states, and what happens in one country influences what happens in another one. So, yeah, I’m here for that. We did a big action called God Save Abortion in front of the Indiana Supreme Court with a huge vagina, and I really want to see more protest and activism happening around reproductive rights.
You’ve alluded at various times to your mental health, or some issues you’ve had with depression, or anxiety, or both. Does it affect the art you make and the work you do, or is your art and your work helpful with any it…or is this perhaps not something you want to speak about in a public forum?
No, it’s fine talk about it; it’s one of the things I think we should be talking about openly. Mental health is important. I do struggle with major depressive disorder, PTSD, anxiety. It’s not fun. I’ve been on medication since 2014, since I got out of jail—I think it was triggered by my two years in jail.
I’ve found that TMS—transcranial magnetic stimulation—really helps me. It’s the next step after electroconvulsive therapy, which I’m sure you’re aware of, but electroconvulsive therapy is much more intrusive—it really can fuck up your memory—and TMS doesn’t do that. It’s magnetic stimulation, much more gentle, and I did two courses of that. There are downsides—it causes headaches sometimes, and of course it’s very time-consuming to have to show up to a doctor’s office every single day for eight weeks. But it really helped with bringing back motivation, and resilience, and stability in my mood.
Does it influence my art? I don’t really think so. I mean, I know that there are artists who create their best art from a place of despair, but I usually have to come to some sort of stable plateau to even be able to think about creating something. And I need to feel good about myself. I’m not just trying to throw my bleeding intestines on people—I’m also trying to communicate something positive and a message of hope and strength and, again, resilience. And I don’t want to create my art from darkness, even though it is present, obviously, in our lives.
The ultimate goal of my life and my art is to be this amulet of hope, this light in the end of this dark tunnel. Being in control of the energy that you send to people speaks for your art, and I don’t want people to get more depressed when they look at my art. I want them to be inspired. My target audience has never been big: It’s already people who are on my side, who are kind of radical—feminists, pirates, queer people, just all sorts of outcasts. The goal of my art has always been to be a flag of hope for these people, like, Hey, I see you, you exist. We have each other. I’m not Taylor Swift. I’m for the weirdos.
