Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova on bringing her punk protest art and a prison cell to New Mexico

On the wall is a photograph exhibiting Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of many creators of the Russian feminist protest artwork collective Pussy Riot, in a blue jail uniform, seated at a small desk, with a naked wood board to her proper. The wall is that of a small room, an nearly precise copy of the jail cell in Siberia the place the artist spent two years in solitary confinement. The room is on the finish of a corridor lit shiny crimson, with crimson paint splattered on the ground to resemble blood. It’s the ultimate scene guests encounter in Tolokonnikova’s exhibition at Container in Santa Fe, Putin’s Ashes (till 20 July).

The exhibition spans two flooring, consists of many works made in latest months and takes guests on a journey by way of the traumas and violence Tolokonnikova suffered because of her activism towards Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime. The artist guides me, by the use of her cellphone’s digital camera, by way of what she calls a “whole set up”, a reference to the view of late Ukrainian American artist Ilya Kabakov that conceptual artists ought to be in control of the context of their exhibitions, together with the areas between the artworks.

Pussy Riot fashioned in 2011, with a loud punk aesthetic framing the performances staged by the group. Initially an all-women and female-identifying collective, Pussy Riot has developed into a world motion with tons of of members of all genders. This exhibition shares the identical title as a Pussy Riot efficiency staged earlier this 12 months, through which a gaggle of girls in balaclavas burned an effigy of the Russian president. The ashes retrieved from that efficiency had been collected in small glass flasks of various sizes that at the moment are a part of the set up. Together with them, there are buttons on the wall that, if pushed, promise to show Putin into ashes and remove sexism.

The area is a component white dice, half avenue protest, with paint-splattered barrels positioned all through and graffiti on the partitions. Close to the doorway are plush-framed panels that includes phrases comparable to “this artwork is simply too political” or “this artwork is created by a legal”. A few of them are splashed with crimson paint to evoke blood, some have stitching machine elements hooked up to them.

Throughout her practically two years’ detention in Russian penal colonies, Tolokonnikova needed to sew army uniforms utilizing previous machines with often-broken elements that injured her fingers. “At night time, I might dream that I would get new units of needles and elements of stitching machines,” she says. “In actuality you by no means had sufficient and also you needed to injure your self whereas stitching. So that is my blood.” Incarcerated girls had been sometimes required to work between eight and 16 hours every day. “They’d me work lower than different prisoners as a result of I had attorneys and stuff, however I nonetheless needed to fulfill the identical quota, so I needed to be very centered.”

In a hallway at Container, a sequence of screens exhibits what the artist calls Pussy Riot’s “legacy movies”, recordings of the performances that introduced the group world consideration. They embody footage of a latest efficiency in entrance of the jail through which the opposition chief Alexei Navalny is detained, and Punk Prayer, the 2012 efficiency in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour that earned Tolokonnikova and two different activists of the group jail sentences. The wall alongside the staircase to the gallery’s second flooring may appear to be one thing out of a nightclub, however the pink squares that adorn it body knives like these made in jail with makeshift supplies, as improvised weapons of self-protection. These had been solid from steel recovered from an deserted jail and are formed in a particular Pussy Riot fashion into symbols of girls’s energy.

Alongside the centrepiece of the present, a fall-filing projection of the quick movie documenting the Putin’s Ashes efficiency, there are posters that includes lyrics from Pussy Riot’s first tune, Kill the Sexist, and textual content from Tolokonnikova’s court docket sentence. Atop the texts are drawings of a vagina-shaped Virgin Mary determine, which the artist says resulted in her being added to Russia’s record of wished criminals. Within the centre of the room is a sculpture that includes a dollhouse, HAUNTED! (2023), whose façade and interiors are coated in tablets and orange tablet bottles crawling over each floor like invasive species. The tablet bottles are for duloxetine, Tolokonnikova says, “the remedy I’ve to take ever since I bought out of jail as a result of I used to be identified with PTSD and despair. I hate these tablets and am attempting to get off them. However they maintain coming again to my life. And it’s at all times a wrestle.” The work is accompanied by a soundscape and poetry created by Bono of U2. One passage states, “I turned my rage into magnificence and my magnificence into rage.”

Although Pussy Riot’s artwork straight engages with Russian politics, a number of the subjects the present at Container offers with are related to different international locations as effectively. “Since Pussy Riot’s inception, we’ve at all times wished to be common and world,” Tolokonnikova says. “I like to name it alter-globalist as a result of I consider that we want coordination on a world degree to attain our objectives as humanity. In any other case, world poverty, psychological well being, monetary inequality and wars should not going to be solved. We’re not doing job on that. I consider that collectives like Pussy Riot, or Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, or Extinction Rise up, with their world help base, are essential to counteract the unhealthy gamers, comparable to transnational firms or authoritarian governments.”

For the reason that imprisonment of three of their members, one of many focus areas for Pussy Riot has develop into incarceration and jail reform. Throughout a earlier go to to the US, Tolokonnikova and different members of the group made clear that this was a precedence. “We met the then mayor of New York, Invoice de Blasio, and he requested us, ‘How can I assist you?’” she says. “We stated, ‘We wish to go to jail.’ He was like, ‘You simply bought out of jail,’ and we stated, ‘No, we wish to go to Rikers.’ We wished to see the situations there.”

The mayor’s workplace organised a go to to the notorious Rikers Island jail advanced, which activists have been calling on metropolis to close down for years. Pussy Riot members toured the power and talked to incarcerated individuals however took the expertise with a grain of salt. “Formally organised visits should not actual, so then we spoke with individuals who went by way of Rikers and we linked with teams engaged on rehabilitation by way of artwork,” says Tolokonnikova. “My curiosity continues. I visited jail services in downtown Los Angeles, I bought to attempt the meals—which was completely horrible. I bought to see how they deal with mentally in poor health individuals: they chained them to the desk. There’s a lot to handle. And the truth that the jail inhabitants per capita in the USA is the most important on the planet whereas the nation claims to be the land of the free is simply unhappy.”

A hall marked by crimson lights results in the jail cell, the place the exhibition ends. Tolokonnikova was there on opening day, welcoming guests to Container and to the reproduction of her cell. She says she won’t rent a bodyguard—as her pal, artist Judy Chicago, retains recommending—as a result of in her view if her authorities actually desires to poison her with a military-grade nerve agent, having a guard will make little completely different.

“Once I bought out of jail in early 2014, I couldn’t recognise my nation,” she says. “It was a lot darker, censorship was stronger and folks had been extra afraid. After which [Russia’s annexation of] Crimea occurred and it was actually the start of the tip.”

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022, the artist has felt an ever-stronger have to act. She has been collaborating with Ukrainians who she says are much less scared than Russians and have been an inspiration for her because the nation’s first Orange Revolution started, in 2004. And whereas she concedes that there are some Ukrainians for whom “the one good Russian is a lifeless Russian”, she says there are additionally many who’re keen to collaborate along with her. For the exhibition at Container, Tolokonnikova relied on the assistance of Ukrainian producerVal Zabaluyev, and she or he says about 40% of the ladies who took half within the Putin’s Ashes efficiency had been from Ukraine; a few of them had lately fled the nation due to the warfare.

“I nonetheless consider that artwork could be extra highly effective than tanks and bullets generally as a result of bullets can solely penetrate your physique, artwork can penetrate your thoughts,” Tolokonnikova says. “So my artwork follows the phrase: this artwork is a weapon.”

Pussy Riot/Nadya Tolokonnikova: Putin’s Ashes, till 20 July, Container, Santa Fe, New Mexico