Members of the Russian feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot got arrested in Moscow in 2012 — for walking into a cathedral in mini dresses and balaclavas to perform a “Punk Prayer,” a protest of Russian President Vladamir Putin and his relationship with the Orthodox Church.
It landed 22-year-old activist Nadya Tolokonnikova, along with another Pussy Riot member, in prison for almost two years. She described the experience in a 2023 TED talk: “The hell was in front of me. I was forced to sew police and military uniform, and I was getting injured while I was doing it. But even in the darkest moments, I know that our fight is not over.”
Tolokonnikova continued to protest Putin after her release. Two years ago, she was added to Russia’s list of most wanted criminals after showing an art installation called “Putin’s Ashes” at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in West Hollywood.
Now at her show “Police State,” running June 5 to 14, at The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, she’s staying in a steel replica of her Russian cell. Inside, she’ll make music and art, using a sewing machine. The exhibition also features art by other current and former political prisoners.
As visitors observe her through peepholes, she’s almost playfully forcing them to become prison guards, she explains. “So is life — we’re being forced into roles that we didn't agree to. That's the nature of living in a police state. Decisions are being made for you.”
During her time in the Russian penal colony, Tolokonnikova says she and other incarcerated women spent 16 hours per day sewing garments, with no days off and no holidays.
When not sewing, they did all types of manual labor. “Labor that doesn't make any sense, but just want to break the will and personality of a person, and just make them part of something greater or … become a shadow of their own former self,” she explains. “That's widely used in a Russian penal colony. So you're digging trenches, moving really heavy concrete blocks from one place to another, and you’re bringing them back. So it's very Kafkaesque, so there is no underlying meaning of all of it. … I think that's what jail is really good at — rendering you obsolete as a person.”
Tolokonnikova says she previously had lots of interests, then after a month behind bars, they whittled down to just getting a piece of bread and ensuring her boots weren’t wet. Because the weather was cold, and if she became sick, she could’ve died. No one was going to treat her. Losing herself completely was the scariest part, she says.
“You become a pure body that just fights for survival. … It really took me a miracle to come back to my former self.” That miracle was finding an article that Vaclav Havel wrote in the late 1970s, called "The Power of the Powerless.” Havel was a famous Czech dissident who later became the country’s president.
“It felt like he's speaking directly to me, and that helped me to realize that well, even though it does feel like I have no power anymore, and I have no access to media, I can barely speak to my relatives, my lawyers are far away in Moscow, I still can change things here and there.”
She ended up going on a hunger strike and penning an open letter about slave conditions in her jail, which later led to reduced working hours.
In addition to Havel’s influence, Tolokonnikova found a friend and mentor in Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader who died in prison last year. Tolokonnikova recalls meeting Navalny when she was 17 years old, in 2007 during one of her first protests, which led to her first-ever arrest. She says Navalny stood out in Russian political circles because he built communities nationwide.
“He would take on a case of corruption, and he will not stop until he'll investigate it to the smallest detail. … He went on to making documentaries about it. And he's just very charming, charismatic. And people would want to follow him naturally. And I think that's one of the reasons why Putin hated him. It was envy.”
Navalny’s death meant hope was taken away, Tolokonnikova says, but responsibility was born. “Now we became adults. Now it's on us.”
She sees similarities between Putin’s Russia and Trump’s United States. Both leaders hate democracy and love authoritarianism, she says.
“I think that's what Trump is trying to do now with the United States, just remove checks and balances as much as he can, then scapegoating certain individuals. In Russia, that would be me. United States, that would be me as well, because I'm a migrant.”
Tolokonnikova says she often thinks about the risk of being sent back to Russia. She used to travel a lot — for her work as an artist, activist, and educator — but she’s been staying put because Russia added her to an international wanted list.
“I'm already arrested in absentia, which means that at the moment I'm arriving to Russia, I'm going directly to jail. Besides me being accused of hurting religious feelings through one of my art pieces, there is also … new accusation of terrorism that is brewing against me for supporting Ukraine.”
She continues, “There's a risk to be alive. But I think it's a bigger risk to censor yourself. … One of the biggest tools of any authoritarian … system is self-censorship. So when people start censoring themselves because their fear of possible consequences, and it's a very understandable human feature, right? But I think as an activist, you have to constantly fight this … and just continue to speak up no matter what.”