Nadya Tolokonnikova created Pussy Riot in 2011 partly in response to Vladimir Putin’s declaration that he would continue his reign over Russia. In 2012, when she and her collaborators undertook their now-famous performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, she was infamously sentenced to two years in prison, vaulting the art collective to international fame.
I spoke with Nadya over Zoom one Saturday in February 2024, more than a decade since Pussy Riot’s founding, her imprisonment, and her release. The artist must live geo-anonymously, a more pressing concern now that she’s not only on Russia’s most-wanted list but was also arrested in absentia in November. The threat she faces from her home country became even more precarious given that, less than two weeks after we talked, Russian opposition leader, activist, and friend of the artist Alexei Navalny died in a remote Russian prison.
There’s a notable point in our conversation when Nadya describes her desire to see the Russian Orthodox Church, the same one at the heart of that 2012 performance, become something like a women’s healthcare center offering free birth control and abortions. When I say I want her version to become a reality—meaning, I’d like someone to take action and create such a space—Nadya responds that she wants to build it. This is what makes her so impactful as an artist and a human: she’s fiercely determined and committed to showing up in the streets, online, and in the studio, wielding the twin tools of art and activism to very literally create the world she wants to live in.
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Shown above is the artist in a still from “Putin’s Ashes.” All images courtesy of the artist, shared with permission.
Grace Ebert: How are you today?
Nadya Tolokonnikova: Doing good. I’m working on some things. I’ve been studying calligraphy, and I’ve been just drawing a bunch.
Grace: Have you always drawn?
Nadya: It’s more like calligraphy, so it’s not really drawing. It’s a different skill set. I always had good handwriting. It’s time for me to explore my roots because it’s something that was born in my part of the world in the 14th century. I’m interested in medieval times because I feel like we’re going back, and I need to reflect that.
Grace: To also go back a bit, you created Pussy Riot in 2011. Since then, the collective has made countless works that you’ve been involved in and that you haven’t been involved in. I’ve heard you say that anyone can join Pussy Riot and act under its name. I understand that from an activist perspective and that a lot of collectives historically have allowed anyone to join as long as they have similar values. But as an artist, what does it mean to structure the collective in that way?
Nadya: You mean, is it more difficult in terms of aesthetic values?
Grace: Yeah, like what does it mean to have people putting on performances or creating work under the Pussy Riot name when you’re not directly involved?
Nadya: We created a pretty good visual bible from the start, and it’s very easy to reproduce and follow. We did it knowingly because before Pussy Riot, I was also a co-founder of another art collective called Voina, which translates to war and was a war against artist institutions and Putin’s government. In that collective, every action of ours was completely different. It could be anything from a staged performance in a shopping mall to projecting a skull and bones as a canvas on the White House of Russia. That kind of thing is very difficult to reproduce because it can only be born from the very specific core peoples’ minds.
We were partly influenced by Femen. They started a few years earlier than Pussy Riot, and what attracted me to their actions is that they do have a very strong visual bible. It allowed them to have chapters all around the world and truly become a movement. I loved that. I think we consciously, or sometimes subconsciously, reproduced that model in Pussy Riot. It proved to be a working model once we ended up in jail. I couldn’t come up with ideas for actions anymore, but other people did, and it truly grew into an international movement. So it’s easy from that perspective.
Of course, it’s tough for me to see a good action without good documentation because people often don’t think about how important a person who has a photo and video camera is. The action could be gorgeous, but if you don’t have a good photographer to capture it, then it’s just not gonna work. For me, it’s painful to see, but I still think it works all together. It’s complimentary. You have different styles, different actions, different attitudes. People have different means, different connections, and there is beauty in it.
Grace: Is that why initially you gravitated toward performance art, in comparison to another medium that could also be created as an act of protest?
Nadya: With the views that I have, it’s impossible to get into art institutions in Russia. Not just exhibiting but even participating in a panel talk. No interaction with official art institutions is possible. It narrows down your options, even if you think about photography. When we started, the internet was around definitely, but it wasn’t as developed as a medium as it is today. I think today it’s totally possible. Back in the day, everything was more physical still, and you had to have a real presence in order to make a real difference. I think today, not really. I mean, you can live on the North Pole and still have a real influence with a blog or TikTok. But our options were super narrow.
I also was personally drawn to performance art because I was exposed to it pretty early. When I was 14 or 15 years old, my home city of Norilsk in Siberia was visited by Prigov, who besides being a poet, sculptor, musician, at his core is a performance artist. He described his life as a project, like, “This life is a project of Dimitri Aleksandrovich Prigov.” This is his full name. So all other mediums fall into his life as a project.
I was so drawn to this idea. I realized that it gave me so much more freedom than my parents or teachers, whoever was around me when I was a little girl told me. They would say, “Well, we have to pick an avenue,” and then just live your life constraining yourself. I realized that you can describe your art life as art and an art performance. Then you can really go any direction, and there’s going to be a valid move, at least for yourself. And that’s what matters, right? If you personally think that what you do is important or valid? So performance art chose me, I guess.
Grace: Would you consider your life your art project then? In that same way?
Nadya: I’m not there yet to describe it like this. I feel like he was a little bit older when he came up with this concept, maybe? I describe some parts of my life as an art project, like to reclaim my identity. When I was thrown in jail, my agency was taken away from me. And I’m trying to reclaim it by describing those two years in jail as a performance art project. It’s a little bit of a joke, but also not really because every single day I was trying to fight for some sort of meaning to what’s going on. And to my life.
Viktor Frankl described it in his book where he talks about his experience in a concentration camp, which was obviously not comparable to what I’ve been through, but it was an important book for me. He talks about man’s search for meaning, and it was totally applicable to my experience, which was lighter, but still, it was very tough. So in that sense, it was an art project every single day.
Grace: I know that in such difficult circumstances, the pressure is to survive and to, I don’t know, try to find yourself amid horrible times. But to make your life an art project every day feels like it would require a lot of emotional energy.
Nadya: At some point, all my emotions died. That was something that launched a lot of psychological problems that I still deal with. All my emotions just went to sleep. As I learned later in an academic description of trauma, you have to somehow open yourself up again because you don’t want to walk around life like a mummy. It was a fight for feeling something.
But people helped a lot. And even though I was forbidden from having friends, my friends would go through lots of problems in order to stay my friends. Some of them lost the possibility to have parole because they wanted to stay my friend. Another human really helps a lot in any circumstance.
Grace: The connection. Absolutely.
From the action ‘Punk Prayer,’ Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow (2012). Photo by Mitya Aleshkovsky
Nayda: I have Johann Hari’s Lost Connections. Have you ever come across that book?
Grace: I haven’t read that, but I did just read his later book, Stolen Focus.
Nadya: I just read it, too. So good. My focus is so stolen. It’s insane.
Grace: What’s your relationship to social media and the internet these days?
Nadya: As you see, I went a little bit offline lately. I’m coming back to physical stuff like paper and pen and wooden panel. It’s rewarding. During the pandemic, I started to do more stuff with my hands. I’m by no means the only one. I’ve heard that a lot from my friends because all of us were online 24/7. Everything was online, doctor’s appointments, everything. We all started to look back at the physical world. I started to do some clothing projects and projects to help me survive because all of my sources of income died down. As a performing artist, we had no place to perform. So I started to create clothes, and I did this DIY collection.
Now I discovered the joy of doing something with my hands, which before I’d never really done. I mean, I dug trenches when it was needed for an action, like once we decided to bury a police car so we dug a giant hole. It was with my own hands, but it wasn’t pleasure. It was just something that we needed to do.
I loved what Johann said in Stolen Focus. It is annoying that social media did not incentivize us to make us more connected to each other. Recently, I’ve been complaining quite a lot about just one simple thing. I cannot find new music anymore because Spotify just keeps me in my own bubble. Unless someone in person gives me a hint about what to listen to, it just keeps me in the loop of something that I’ve been listening to over and over again for the last bloody five years! So not a big fan.
But that being said, Pussy Riot was as much an online phenomenon as offline. Our end product for all our performances was always something that we jokingly called a music video, which was not really music. It was more a documentation of the performance. We were playing with the entertainment culture of music videos. If somebody sees a Pussy Riot action just on the street, that’s going to be a miserable thing. We’re just screaming something or getting dragged by cops. The music most likely is not playing because our PA system has been taken away by cops. It’s just chaotic. You don’t hear what’s going on. You cannot hear a word. Like, are we pro-Putin or against Putin or singing something about our vaginas or what? So when it’s nice and focused and in a package then it could be part of a campaign for spreading good ideas.
Grace: Yeah, social media is certainly useful in protest.
Nadya: It is. It’s very useful for organizing, but you also can spend too much time on the internet and never show up in the street. And that’s not what we want to do right?
I went to Planned Parenthood a few months ago, and there were pro-life protesters. They just spent time there. They were standing out there for eight hours a day with their banners. And it’s very admirable because they just show up. I think it’s really cool. And they could have done a post on the internet, but they showed up.
Grace: That’s one thing that conservatives do. They do show up.
Nadya: They do. We’re too cool for school.
A still from “Putin’s Ashes”
Grace: You’ve talked a little bit about how you don’t want to let the fear of craft or how good something is, technically speaking, hold you back from being out in the streets and doing the actions and performances. And still, your recent works, like “Putin’s Ashes,” are so impeccably produced. How are you thinking about craft these days?
Nadya: There are times to throw stones and times to collect stones. So there are times when you can afford to spend a little bit more time on perfecting your craft, and I think it’s so important. Otherwise, it’s just sloppy. It’s good to learn craft.
But it doesn’t have to be something that stops you from doing an action when it’s time to do an action. How do you know when the work is done? I don’t know. I think it’s intuition. We talk about art and activism. Both things require a good amount of intuition. Being able to listen to your intuition requires good mental health. So please take care of your mental health. If you’re just in a bad place and you want to hide, your intuition is dead. I’m spending a lot of time and energy and all sorts of different things I do to just keep my mental state in good shape, focused and clean, to be able to listen to the world.
I think about an artist almost like an antenna that has to hear things. We’re privileged in a way that we can take our time to just sit down, listen, and be this antenna. Not everyone is privileged to do that. Some people have to work three jobs, and that’s just unfortunate. I hope we’re gonna have UBI [universal basic income], and everyone is going to be able to have much more free time on their hands.
I think about an artist almost like an antenna that has to hear things.—Nadya Tolokonnikova
Grace: The dream.
Nadya: Yeah! I’m a big proponent. It’s just a basic level of dignity that every human being deserves. We don’t have to constantly prove that we’re worthy.
When you try to put together an activist project, there are a lot of people who will tell you that this is not professional, that is not professional. Maybe it’s the late capitalism thing. It’s not just about activism. It’s about art as well. A lot of art is overproduced.
But if you think about the early punk movement, it was pretty raw. A lot of them started their bands as jokes and then later grew into something very important and significant. Now you can start something as a joke and then learn your craft like I did. I learned songwriting.
Grace: It’s amazing how you’ve harnessed this DIY approach for teaching yourself. I know that you studied philosophy and have some formal education, of course, but the number of references in your book, in your interviews, even in this conversation, you must have this encyclopedic memory.
Nadya: Thank you. That’s so kind. I’m not really fond of my memory, but maybe I should be.
Grace: Or maybe it’s not memory? You draw connections between things. You have such a strong foundation of philosophy and art and history, which clearly seeps into your work.
Nadya: Yeah, a mental map, I guess. It gives me a sense of identity. I think I struggle a bit sometimes. You would never think so looking at me, but I struggle with the sense of identity, of self. What am I doing in the world? We talked with my daughter who’s 15 now, and she said, “I’m a little bit worried that I am so old, and I still don’t know 100 percent what I’m going to do in my life.” And I was like I’m 34, and I still don’t know what I’m doing in my life. It’s good news but also bad news that it’s not going to stop anytime soon.
So creating this mental map helps me to maintain this sense of self that has some longevity and roots through philosophy, history, science.
“This art is a hammer that shapes reality” (2023)
Grace: I would imagine that living this geo-anonymous life impacts that. You’re globally ambiguous necessarily. I understand why that’s the case. But what is it like to have this fluid identity, particularly in terms of geography, which tends to be something that really grounds us, and also live so publicly? What is that contrast like?
Nadya: You hit it right in the heart of things. There’s this little slipping identity thing that is attached to me being a nomadic figure. It started ever since I left my hometown when I was 16, and then I never came back. Never, not even once. I moved to Moscow, and then Moscow became the center, this rooting factor of my identity and also my performance practice. Voina first and then Pussy Riot.
Moscow State University wasn’t heaven on Earth, but also your alma mater gives you a sense of identity. And then I was thrown out of it and found myself in jail. That’s where most of my psychological problems started to arise. If you throw a plant out of the soil, they die. That’s how I felt.
Then I came back from jail, but the problem was the world was never the same for me. I wasn’t able to do performance art in the streets anymore because I was followed by police. We tried to do one action at the Sochi Olympics, and we got terribly beaten by Cossacks, pepper sprayed in our faces. It became all of a sudden really serious. Government people were attacking us, and it started to be life-threatening.
So I lost my performance art practice, and my community because a lot of people didn’t want to go to jail. A lot of people stopped participating in protest actions. Some people stopped communicating with me because they perceived me as too famous. That was not something I necessarily chose for myself because we were anonymous. Two years in jail, something that you cannot control at all, and the next day you get out, and yes, you take photos with Madonna, which is undeniably cool, but then your whole community and world are not the same anymore. I had to restructure everything in terms of my practice, like learning how to do stuff in the studio, writing songs, creating actual music videos because I couldn’t do guerilla-style actions. You’re 25, and you have to re-invent everything again.
And then I couldn’t live in Moscow anymore even. That became too dangerous. Now there are a couple of criminal cases on me, including one for terrorism, which is up to 25 years in jail. I cannot travel to a lot of places in the world. Just Europe and North America are safe for me. For example, I don’t know if you’ve followed it, but it was a big huge deal in Russian media with one of the biggest Russian bands Bi-2. They’re very big. I’ve been listening to them since I was a kid. They got detained in Thailand and almost deported to Russia, but they were able to go to Israel instead. That was really scary. They spent a week in jail in Thailand, and they were about to get sentenced. In Russia, they would be sentenced for 15 years or something for supporting Ukraine. Then on top of that, you have to think about getting poisoned by the FSB when you travel places, when you see people.
It does add up a lot to to a feeling of slipping identity and just an endangered identity I guess. But on the flip side, I always think about artists like Banksy or to a lesser extent Daft Punk. Artists who played with anonymity as their tools, as their brushes and paint. It’s also my strength.
The reason why I insist on being a geo-anonymous is not just because of the danger coming from the Russian government. Obviously, there is that part, but also, I want to give people exactly what I want to give them. In that sense, I treat myself as a performance artist. For example, when you have an appearance on MSNBC, the first thing that appears is, “This is Nadya, and she speaks from Moscow.” And I’m questioning that. How does that influence what we’re discussing right now if we’re talking about Trump? It’s irrelevant where I’m at right now.
Grace: That’s also a very art-world thing. So many people are described as where they were born and where they’re based. We do it on Colossal.
Nadya: My favorite art world phrase is “I live between London and New York.” And I’m like, where? The ocean?
For a long time, I was living in Moscow but traveling a lot. People started asking how much time do you actually spend in Moscow? Like, do you want to inspect my anus? What else do you want? It was just being comfortable with creating boundaries. It inspires other people to do it as well. I mean, I got inspired by people like Banksy, and hopefully, somebody will look at me and be just like, yeah, I don’t have to open up things that I don’t want to open up about myself.
“Holy Squirt” (2023)
Grace: Speaking of that public life, I saw your wedding in The New York Times. Congratulations.
Nadya: Thank you.
Grace: And I saw that you baked your own cake in the shape of a cross. I’m so curious about that symbol. Are you thinking of wearing and using the cross as a reclamation? What continues to draw you to that symbol?
Nadya: I’m stealing it back. I was accused of having a religious hatred. My official criminal article, when they sent me for two years in jail was hooliganism and inciting religious hatred, which I did not have. I was arguably very interested in religion and invested heavily into inspiring conversations among Russians about religion, not in the sense that you have to go and believe in God, but in the sense that it’s a part of our culture.
In the Soviet Union, the agenda was to just destroy religion, right? Everyone had to be an atheist. So my take was it’s an important part of culture. It’s an important language. We shouldn’t be fundamentalists from any side. We should not be atheist fundamentalists or religious fundamentalists. It’s a cool thing, in terms of language, font–I’m using a church font in my calligraphy right now–the imagery, and architecture are just stunning. The Bolsheviks were blowing up the churches, which was a crime against culture.
Then the church came back and reinstated its power in Russia. And knowing how difficult it is to be the oppressed, they decided to be the oppressors themselves. It just blows my mind. I’m like, can we have a little bit more nuanced conversation and just peacefully coexist, please? That was my whole vibe when we came to the church. We got accused of religious hatred, which was just pure bullshit. It was a smokescreen. The Russian government didn’t want to talk about our political agenda, about feminism, about LGBTQ+. They didn’t want to talk about our anti-Putin pro-democracy stance. They wanted to talk about God and that we went against God.
So I’m using it because they used it against me, and I guess it’s just another way of reclaiming and taking it from them. This is not their symbol anymore. Sometimes I turn it upside down, and I look at it as a symbol of feminism. Right side up, it’s a symbol of patriarchy. We literally call the head of the Russian Church the patriarch. How is that even okay in 2024?
I sometimes call myself the matriarch of the new Russian
Orthodox Church. I like imagining a world where a
church exists, but it’s chill and nice and welcoming.—
Nadya Tolokonnikova
When it’s turned upside down, it doesn’t mean satan for me. It’s just the opposite of it, which would be matriarchy. I sometimes call myself the matriarch of the new Russian Orthodox Church. I like imagining a world where a church exists, but it’s chill and nice and welcoming. You can go to church like you go to Planned Parenthood almost. You’re in trouble, you need to have an abortion, and you go to church. It’s like your nice and cool aunt. This is how I want the church to be.
I never went to Planned Parenthood, and now I go there with my teenage daughter. We’re blown away. They give you birth control pills, the full supply for free for the whole year. It’s communist in its best possible sense. It’s about sharing and caring. In my church, when I’m going to be the matriarch, people will also go there to get their birth control pills.
Grace: I want that church.
Nadya: I want to build it. It’s one of my dreams one day. I’m not wealthy enough, but I want to buy, or someone else can buy me, a church. I want to paint it pink and call it the Church of Feminism.
Grace: What else is in your utopian vision?
Nadya: The environment is a big thing. I’m from a very polluted industrial city, and my first-ever exposure to activism was through environmentalism and feminism. Later in life, I realized that they actually go hand in hand. Much later, I became vegan. I realized that veganism is also a part of this triangle of happiness. So there’s that. I mean, it’s the whole political program.
I hope for a world where it will be easier for people to travel. It’s really difficult these days with visas and all. And it’s not getting easier. It’s getting worse. I was a child of the ‘90s. I was born in ‘89, and if you look at the whole world, it felt like everyone was ecstatic. You can say different things about the concept of the end of history, and it’s proven not to be right. But it felt like the world was going to be better from now on, and it’s going to be easier to travel. We thought that visas were going to be a thing of the past for Russians because we thought we were going to be part of whatever Europe, like some future European Union or something. And it turned into something opposite.
Grace: What else are you working on these days?
Nadya: There is a show coming up. It’s my first big museum show at OK Linz, and it’s going to be called RAGE. I’m working on a bunch of works for it. A lot of them are going to be based on this Slavic calligraphy that’s been used in a lot of religious contexts. I always loved text-based works, but I wanted to do my own spin on them because there is way too much Arial font going on in art. I’ve done those too, but it gets tiring.
I’m working on some prototypes. It says, “Go fuck yourself,” but written in this font. It’s inspired a lot by Moscow conceptualists. Eric Bulatov and I have been working on a book that will be released later after the exhibit is opened. It will be a dive into Pussy Riot history and what came before Pussy Riot, which was Voina collective.
It’s possible but difficult to understand where Pussy Riot comes from without the history of Voina. At the end of Voina, we split into groups. One of them later became Pussy Riot. The reason for the split was, among everything else, sexism within the collective. We first started just another Voina group, and then were just like, you know what? Fuck it. We’re going to cover our faces and start something new, fresh. The book will be talking about Voina there, so basically, my practice from 2007 to now.
There will be some sculptures that have been very fun to make. They’re still in progress. The idea is to take used sex dolls and then turn them into Pussy Riot characters, warriors. It’s been a fun project but so complicated because first, we have to identify who is going to sell you sex dolls. So we found people and got them. Then we have to create an inner carcass structure because they’re not made for standing. They’re made for something else. Then you want to give them a very confident pose, like the poses we did for “God Save Abortion,” with fists in there. A confident, strong woman pose. Next, we’re going to add some dominatrix-type costumes and turn her basically into this dominatrix Pussy Riot character and give her some weapons. They have pink baseball bats and some different weapons that they hold in their hands.
They’re turned from just objects that are the quintessence of the patriarchal attitude towards women into the opposite. They turn into feminist superheroes. I want to place them in a little chapel that is in front of the museum. It’s tiny, but it’s beautiful. It has some legit Catholic icons painted on the walls. It’s a partisan museum. It’s not functional. And there is a mirror floor so it’s gonna be pretty.
I’m super excited. I’m working on one of the dolls with Niohuru X. She does the drag show, Dragula. We’ve been friends for a while. We collaborated before. She’s working on this Chinese goddess, turning these dolls into beautiful female warrior creatures.
Grace: I appreciate that you work on so many collaborations. That feels so special.
Nadya: Thank you. It’s important. I just got a call from a person new to me from the art world, and they were really, I guess surprised, that I instantly connected them with someone else who is a big supporter and friend in the art world. It’s just not what people do. But this is what people do in activism. We ask for help, and we make connections. I feel a little bit like a stranger in the art world often because there are a good number of people who do not do that.
This is what people do in activism. We ask for help, and we make connections. I feel a little bit like a stranger in the art world often because there are a good number of people who do not do that.—Nadya Tolokonnikova
I also want to mention “God Save Abortion.” An important part of our work is to continue guerilla actions and work with local communities. We’ve worked with students from Indiana University. I’m a big fan of combining theory and practice. I was invited for a lecture, and I said, well, maybe we’ll also do a little action because it’s not just about talking about activism. It’s also actually practicing it. And it turned out beautifully. It was just added to a show that is happening right now in Los Angeles. It’s called Interreality.
There’s more stuff to come because reproductive rights, unfortunately, is still a very important topic.
Interreality is on view through March 18 in Los Angeles, and RAGE. runs from June 21 to October 20, 2024, in Linz. Find more from Tolokonnikova on her site and Instagram.
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