CURA.

In 2013, several years before “grab ’em by the—” ushered in a new era in American politics, Sarah Silverman did a bit about pussy. In it, the comedian contended the way to really ramp up the “pussy” effect is to say it with a lisp, from cheeks puffed as if full of chaw, that deflate with a whistle as the word breaks. “Pussy” anticipates your objection, hopes to provoke it. A riot of pussy is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy—albeit one expelled from the pussy itself.

Feminist Russian collective Pussy Riot puts pussy into action, turning its disquiet into something raucous, virile, and angry. The group, co-created and led by the Siberian-born artist Nadya Tolokonnikova, is both outré and mordant, deadpan and deadly serious—as well-publicized assassination attempts, incarcerations, and other Russian efforts to squelch Pussy Riot and its supporters evidence. The balaclava-clad collective cites feminist forebears like Guerrilla Girls, whose members also obscured their faces. It’s also indebted to fierce pussy, who likewise employed the word for the unease it stirred in the Reagan-era conservatives it targeted—precisely the people whose indifference to AIDS the group excoriated. Even more so than these American collectives, however, Pussy Riot calls out corruption, hypocrisy, and human-rights violations in its native land while knowing the consequences of this criticism. American groups, who decried political indifference to injustice, were largely met with indifference outside the art world in which they operated. But Putin has dealt with Pussy Riot concretely and brutally.

Pussy Riot was formed in 2011 as a more explicitly feminist offshoot of the activist Russian collective Voina (2007–), and their earliest works were flash-mob-style performances in which the group played thrashy punk from rooftops and on public transport around Moscow. They shot to international visibility in 2012 with the performance Punk Prayer, in which Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, clad in cheerfully color-blocked tights, dresses, and balaclavas, stormed the altar of Moscow’s Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Savior. (The Orthodox Church has been linked with Putinist Russia since 2009, when Putin appointed to the position of Patriarch his political ally Kirill, who has described the autocrat’s rule as a “miracle of God.”) Once onstage, they briefly performed the performance’s titular track. (“Virgin Mary, Mother of God – be a feminist, we pray thee – bless our festering bastard boss – let black cars parade the cross – Virgin Mary, Mother of God – Banish Putin!” etc., although they barely made it past the song’s opening bars before they were unplugged.)

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were ultimately sentenced to two years in a Siberian labor colony for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” a draconian sentence that initially sparked an outcry amongst the aughts artworld. In an online column for Artforum, writer Kate Sutton chronicled the group’s movements leading up to and during the trial, accompanied by wry commentary infused with skepticism. Sutton reported on the ground from a reading in Manhattan of the minutes of the Kafkaesque proceedings; in her telling, the event is redolent of virtue signaling and pageantry. Participants are hamming it up, poking fun at Pussy Riot’s sincerity.

This column, which went live on August 19, 2012, provides a time capsule for the New York artworld’s ambivalent-at-best response to censorship under a bad political actor. A decade later, the magazine would itself bow to pressure from its parent company and fire its editor-in-chief shortly after he signed a letter condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza, which was published on the Artforum site on October 19^th, 2023, quickly pulled, and eventually reposted. The basis of “religious hatred” Putin used to condemn Pussy Riot is now volleyed at anyone in the U.S. who criticizes Israel’s genocide in Gaza or our complicity in it.

Tolokonnikova won’t comment specifically on conflict beyond Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And, given that she’s among a tiny fraction of artworld protesters who have actually faced meaningful consequences for their protest, this feels both fair and prudent. So let’s jump back to Eastern Europe for context into Pussy Riot’s strain of activism—specifically to the balaclava. The cap, a knitwear head covering that is Pussy Riot’s signature, has traditionally been worn throughout the region to protect its wearer’s face during the winter. To Soviet and then Russian teens of the 1980s and ’90s (that is, the nascent Pussy Rioters themselves), the hats would have been familiar as part of the outfit worn by OMON (Отряд мобильный особого назначения), paramilitary units primarily deployed by the Kremlin as riot police. OMON troops initially donned balaclavas to protect against repercussions from Russian mob bosses during raids. As their activities grew murkier, the headwear provided convenient cover. Pussy Riot’s first innovation was to pervert the hat’s menacing anonymity. The PR balaclavas are bright, whimsical, homespun things. They court attention, in diametric contrast to the black and camouflage masks worn by OMON, and now by the ICE officers that are their logical descendants in the narrative of autocratic drift. Tolokonnikova herself is very much not anonymous. As her general media presence attests, she is hot and she likes it! Nevertheless, she’s continuously incorporated the balaclava motif in her work since 2011. Tolokonnikova remains Pussy Riot’s most active and visible member; however, in a 2022 profile for The New York Times, she explained that the collective itself is egalitarian and non-hierarchical. Anyone can become a member and use the name as part of their protest efforts, she said encouragingly.

In addition to advising against asking Tolokonnikova to speak to geopolitical conflicts beyond Russia, the press guidelines I was sent included the bullet point stressing that Pussy Riot is not a band. It’s a confusion that persists more than a decade after the group’s first discordant punk concerts. In a 2022 profile for The Los Angeles Times, she reminded the reader once again that there is no band, that she and Alyokhina, with whom she was imprisoned, “are comrades. It’s really different from being friends, and it was really annoying for both of us that people started to pursue us almost like t.A.T.u. the band. We’re individual people who come together to create political art, but not more than that.” For her part, Tolokonnikova has used Pussy Riot’s name recognition for a vast network of projects spanning performance, installation, and video, and releasing singles and mixtapes, most incorporating the balaclava. She also founded and promotes the decentralized autonomous organization UnicornDAO, a fundraising and investment vehicle for women and LGBTQ+ people in crypto, which, among other things, provides a channel for post-Roe fundraising in support of abortion access. Her 2022 project, Putin’s Ashes, took the prompt of Tolokonnikova’s fantasy of the dictator’s death, cremation, and an envisaged end to despotic autocracy in Russia, and spun it out into a filmed funeral procession that served jointly as performance documentation and as a music video/promotional trailer for a suite of works presented at Deitch Gallery, in which the ashes were displayed in urns within faux-fur frames. The show resulted in Russia reopening its investigation of her for “violation of the right to freedom of conscience and religion,” an article of the Russian criminal code essentially invented for use in Pussy Riot’s 2012 trial. For safety reasons, she no longer discloses where she is located.

Just as Punk Prayer was never about the music, whether Pussy Riot is Tolokonnikova, whether it is a band or something else, is ultimately irrelevant. Like a Fluxus event but meaningfully distinct in its stakes, Pussy Riot’s very existence, its continued utterance, is the work. And as such has proved maddeningly difficult to squelch.

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.”