Los Angeles – Police stateA 10-day sustainable performance of activist, artist and Pussy Riot-Maker Nadya Tolokonnikova, transforms the Cavernous Warehouse of the Geffen Contemporary into the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in a location of carceral detention and government monitoring.
Since Last Thorsday, June 5, Tolokonnikova has occuied a recreation of a drab, Russian Prison Cell Duration the Museum’s Open Hours, and Will Continue To Do So Through This Saturday, June 14. Through Small Peepholes in the SHE created as As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As As Asic’s and Ashe As SHE SHE CORRATEDS ASHE SHE CORRATEDS, Soundscapes That Echo Through the Space, Remixing Various Sources Including Recordings From Actual Prisons, A Live La Police Scanner Feed, and Her Own Heartbeat, Filtered Through a Hart-Monitor-Synitor-Synth Fabricated.
Tolokonnikova spent almost two years in a Russian prison after being convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for Pussy Riot’s Anti-Putin version “Punk Prayer” of 2012, which took place in the cathedral of Christ van Moscow. She was shaken between about a dozen prisons and went into a hunger strike before she was released in December 2013. She based the design for the cell in Moca, with a bed, toilet and sewing machine, on her own experience of imprisonment, as well as defeats from other prisoners, and called it a ‘platonic ideal’ of a prison discelon. The walls of the cell are covered with artwork by nearly 30 current and former political prisoners that she invited to contribute to the show, including Anna Bazhutova, Polina Yevtushenko, Zhenya Makarenko and Oleg Navalny.
After Tolokonnikova had burned a portrait of Vladimir Putin as part of ‘Putin’s Ashes’, an installation from 2023 in Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles, she was placed on the Russian list of most wanted criminals. “I constantly think of the prison – it’s not something that is in my distant past,” she said. “I have countless criminal cases against me, my journeys are limited. My life is literally in very real danger.”
At Moca, the cell is placed in the middle of the warehouse, while a replica monitoring tower is the watch, the glowing upper lower text reads “big smile for the camera / it’s always” and “no problems in paradise / we will lock them up.” Video plays on two monitors: one with video made in Russian prisons, another streaming images of four security cameras placed in the cell.
“I want people to feel that they are very visceral in a prison,” Tolokonnikova said Hyperallergic Shortly before the exhibition was opened. “I want the audience to take on the role of a prison guard in a certain way. Why not? That is what art does.”
On one side of the cell, Gumball machines filled with colorful balls carry the names of toxins that the Russian government often use to silence critics, including Russian opposition activist Alexei NavalnyA friend and mentor of Tolokonnikova, who died in prison last year while looking for a 19 -year prison sentence. The machines are flanked by two of its “icon” paintings, which combine Cyrillic calligraphy with stylized images of female faces, sometimes with Pussy Riot’s characteristic Balaclavas. Banners who wear the slogan “Punk is not dead” – The title of a recent two -part exhibition At Honor Fraser Gallery – Flutter for fans.
While visitors enter the space, they come across a large, glowing symbol that is invented by Tolokonnikova that looks like a Russian Orthodox cross hanging on the ceiling for a couch with pews benches that offer an uplifting, spiritual element. “This is a site of both imprisonment and liberation,” said Moca Associate curator Alex Sloane Hyperallergic. “The cell is also a refuge.” This duality is reflected in the Soundscapes, ranging from aggressive noise to rumbling, environmental directors and Russian lullaby songs, which Tolokonnikova plays live on a toy piano.
Although rooted in her own experience in Russia, Tolokonnikova emphasized that the work is aimed at a “worldwide perspective” on imprisonment and autocracy. “This police state is something that floods the whole world,” she said. Nevertheless, the fast escalating repressions in the United States were literally arrived at the door of the museum last Friday, as immigration and customs enforcement agents Nevertheless on LA and started with immigration sweeps. In response, protesters came together in the metropolitan detention center and the royal federal building a block of the museum, where many prisoners had been taken. Tolokonnikova placed one on Friday evening Photo from itself to Instagram Outside the museum for a row of LAPD officers, write: “Ok. I arrived in jail from 9 o’clock @Moca And saw the riot police, helicopters and people who ‘free them all’. Where should I register. “
On Sunday, when the National Guard arrived in LA, Moca decided to close the Heffen -noordaagse location early “From an abundance of caution and for the safety and well -being of our employees and visitors.” Tolokonnikova chose to stay in the empty museum and continue its performance, mixed in audio of the protests just outside the walls. “Duration performance is scary to step in: once you say you’re going to show up, you can’t just leave, simply because the National Guard has a whimping to occupy the city, so my choice was to stay and keep doing my work as an artist,” she said Hyperallergic.
Since the first version of Pussy Riot, the practice of Tolokonnikova has merged skillfully art and activism, media and chaos, challenging corruption, exposing injustice and railing against oppressive power structures with a burning but finely tuned message. As her profile rises in the art world, she is in institutional environments that support apparently progressive policy, but sometimes suppress the abnormal opinion, and last but not least ‘riots’, in the name of the order. Can its abrasive, radical ethos exist side by side within the relative comfort and the safety of the museum? “When you have a coup in your view in your country, an autocratic acquisition of power, I don’t think it’s really time to think about safe spaces,” she said. “It’s time to try to save your ass and save the freedoms you still have.”
Note of the editors 6/11/25 12:13 pm Edt: An earlier version of this article stated that the exhibition contains a Russian Orthodox Cross. It was actually a symbol invented by Tolokonnikova that looks like a Russian orthodox cross cross.
