Nadya Tolokonnikova, the founder of the Russian art and activist collective Pussy Riot, has been placed on Russia’s wanted list after the Kremlin launched a criminal case against her earlier this year for offending religious beliefs.
The Russian news outlet Mediazona discovered yesterday that Tolokonnikova is now listed on the Russian Interior Ministry’s database and faces criminal charges, though the entry does not specify what the charges are. In response, Tolokonnikova says in a statement: “They threaten us but we cannot show fear. I will use the tools I have as an artist and crypto enthusiast to keep fighting. I’m not a soldier, I’m an artist, art is my weapon. Glad to see they are scared.”
Tolokonnikova’s criticism of the Russian president Vladimir Putin, and his increasingly excessive attempts at censorship and oppression, stretches back more than a decade. In 2012, she and two other members of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” over an impromptu concert, titled Punk Prayer, at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, which exhorted the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and concluded with a plea for Putin to be banished.
However, the new charges appear to have been sparked by Tolokonnikova’s latest performance, Putin’s Ashes (2022), which she filmed in August, showing herself and 11 other women wearing balaclavas torching a ten-foot portrait of Putin in the desert. Tolokonnikova bottled the ashes from his burnt portrait and exhibited them together with the short film during her first solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles gallery in January.
“[Putin] probably didn’t like that […] I guess we got enough attention to scare him as we rallied allies in the West who were willing to stand up to Putin and also to aid Ukraine,” Tolokonnikova says.
Within a week of the Los Angeles show opening, Tolokonnikova says her Instagram account vanished “coincidentally” and the new criminal case was announced. “Police detained friends and family, and my lawyers sent me the documents they found,” she adds.
Russian government court papers also refer to an NFT Tolokonnikova released in 2021, titled Virgin Mary, Please Become A Feminist (a line taken from Punk Prayer). According to the legal documents, the NFT, which includes an image of the Virgin Mary drawn in the shape of a vagina, is “an expression of obvious disrespect in relation to the icon image The Virgin Mary, depicted in an obscene form, so that the image is perceived as outwardly similar to the anatomical details of the female external genitalia”. The work, the papers claim, “thereby expresses disrespect, disregard for the image revered in Christianity”.
Tolokonnikova believes this could be the “first time art from an NFT is being used as evidence to try to throw someone in jail”.
Speaking to The Art Newspaper when the NFT was released in 2021, the artist and activist noted how she had “picked this battle” to bring “more positivity, acceptance and democratic rights to the world”, adding: “It doesn’t stop with Putin. We face systemic oppression, it’s a global issue.”
