For more than a decade, Pussy Riot — a feminist, anti-Putin art collective — has been staging brilliant, disruptive and often poetic political stunts. These “actions,” as the group calls them, have been part of its ongoing attempt to expose the absurdity and cruelty endemic in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
For their efforts, Pussy Riot members have been subjected to government harassment, surveillance, beatings, detention, forced labor and now exile. They have also been championed by pop stars, including Madonna, and defended by human rights groups such as Amnesty International. They have been the subjects of documentaries, books and segments on “60 Minutes” and have graced the cover of Time magazine. All the while, as Pussy Riot’s fame has grown, their urgent warnings about Putin have come to seem increasingly prescient.
“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia” is the first overview of what Pussy Riot has been up to the past 10 years. Improvised, anarchic and viscerally intense, the exhibition — at Kling & Bang, an artist-run gallery on the Reykjavik waterfront — may just be the most important of 2022.
The first work you encounter as you enter the show is a short, sensationally provocative video. Filmed only days before the opening in the studio of Ragnar Kjartansson, Iceland’s most famous contemporary artist, the video shows Pussy Riot member Taso Pletner, in a red balaclava, standing on a table over a propped-up portrait of Putin. Pletner hikes up their black smock and proceeds to urinate on the portrait, before kicking it to the ground.
This is political art at its most courageous, least ambiguous and most devastatingly heartfelt.
Revisting 'The Visitors'
When I arrived at Kling & Bang, it was 3 p.m. in Reykjavik, and the sun was already fading. In two hours, the doors would open. Among the expected guests would be Iceland’s prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir. The first thing she and her entourage would see? The video of Pletner urinating on a portrait of … oh, just the nuclear-armed leader of a belligerent country not all that far from Iceland.
If this was going to be awkward for the prime minister, the show’s curators — Kjartansson, his wife, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, and Dorothee Kirch — seemed unconcerned. This was Iceland. They were free. Besides, they counted the prime minister as a personal friend. In fact, earlier in the day, Jakobsdóttir and the visiting Finnish prime minister, Sanna Marin, had met with Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina, one of Russia’s most famous dissidents, to discuss Ukraine.
Alyokhina, known to her friends as Masha, was now crouched on the gallery’s floor, writing text in black marker on the wall. Her friend Kjartansson was standing on a nearby stool, using silver masking tape to write a title. None of the screens were switched on. The digital file of one video was still missing (it was eventually uploaded two minutes before the opening). People scurried back and forth as the clock wound down.
Pussy Riot is used to flying by the seats of its pants. The group’s members improvise. They agitate. If they hit an impediment, they pivot and push in another direction. They all but define urgency. Although known to many as a punk band, they are best understood as artists working in the tradition of performance art. More specifically, they’re political performance artists.
Of course, there’s political art and there’s political art. The first kind preaches to the converted. It usually involves arcane allusions to the grievances of an identity group and rarely reaches an audience outside the art world. The other kind dares to engage in the actual political arena. It is oppositional, offering clear statements grounded in personal conviction. It understands, through bitter experience, what’s at stake. And yet it’s made with exuberance, an embrace of the absurd and antic, undaunted joy.
The idea of a Pussy Riot retrospective hadn’t occurred to Alyokhina until about six months ago. The 34-year-old has an astringent, understated charisma. An unlikely amalgam of Sid Vicious, Greta Thunberg and Harry Houdini, she has been resisting Putin’s regime with humor, smarts and an indefatigable brand of radical innocence for most of her adult life.
Kjartansson first suggested the idea of mounting a retrospective in December, 2021. When, the following May, he and Sigurjónsdóttir showed her Kling & Bang, Alyokhina had only just escaped Russia, where she had been living under so-called “restriction of freedom,” a kind of house arrest. She got out disguised as a food courier, with help from Kjartansson and an undisclosed European government.
“I was quite skeptical,” said Alyokhina, sitting in Kling & Bang’s back office two days after the opening. Pussy Riot, she explained, performed street actions; a retrospective might kill their spirit.
But the war in Ukraine had changed her outlook on everything. “We gradually understood that we don’t want to just show the videos [of Pussy Riot actions]. We wanted to tell the history behind the actions and to explain how we came to this point of war.”
ernational attention was “Punk Prayer,” a 2012 guerrilla-style performance of an anti-Putin song in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. That chaotic, clumsily filmed 51-second eruption of indignation led to a show trial and convictions on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Alyokhina and her friend Nadya Tolokonnikova spent two years in penal colonies. (A third participant, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released after an appeal court hearing after eight months in jail.)
The retrospective traces the stages of Russia’s descent, in the wake of “Punk Prayer,” into state-sanctioned violence and authoritarianism. (“We didn’t receive all the hell in one moment,” Alyokhina told me. “There was a road that led to it.”) The show’s layout is a deliberate mash-up of order and anarchy.
After the video of Pletner urinating on Putin’s portrait, the show introduces audiences to each of Pussy Riot’s actions in the order they happened, beginning with 2011’s “Kropotkin Vodka,” which took aim at conspicuous consumption in the new Russia, and “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protest,” a punk-style performance on the roof of a building in front of a Moscow detention center holding political prisoners.
Text written directly onto the exhibition walls explains not only the actions, but also who did them, the context and the consequences. In a kind of conceptual jujitsu, Pussy Riot has successfully turned every arrest, detention and beating into new proofs of the absurdity of the authorities.
For their efforts, Pussy Riot members have been subjected to government harassment, surveillance, beatings, detention, forced labor and now exile. They have also been championed by pop stars, including Madonna, and defended by human rights groups such as Amnesty International. They have been the subjects of documentaries, books and segments on “60 Minutes” and have graced the cover of Time magazine. All the while, as Pussy Riot’s fame has grown, their urgent warnings about Putin have come to seem increasingly prescient.
“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia” is the first overview of what Pussy Riot has been up to the past 10 years. Improvised, anarchic and viscerally intense, the exhibition — at Kling & Bang, an artist-run gallery on the Reykjavik waterfront — may just be the most important of 2022.
The first work you encounter as you enter the show is a short, sensationally provocative video. Filmed only days before the opening in the studio of Ragnar Kjartansson, Iceland’s most famous contemporary artist, the video shows Pussy Riot member Taso Pletner, in a red balaclava, standing on a table over a propped-up portrait of Putin. Pletner hikes up their black smock and proceeds to urinate on the portrait, before kicking it to the ground.
This is political art at its most courageous, least ambiguous and most devastatingly heartfelt.
Revisting 'The Visitors'
When I arrived at Kling & Bang, it was 3 p.m. in Reykjavik, and the sun was already fading. In two hours, the doors would open. Among the expected guests would be Iceland’s prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir. The first thing she and her entourage would see? The video of Pletner urinating on a portrait of … oh, just the nuclear-armed leader of a belligerent country not all that far from Iceland.
If this was going to be awkward for the prime minister, the show’s curators — Kjartansson, his wife, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, and Dorothee Kirch — seemed unconcerned. This was Iceland. They were free. Besides, they counted the prime minister as a personal friend. In fact, earlier in the day, Jakobsdóttir and the visiting Finnish prime minister, Sanna Marin, had met with Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina, one of Russia’s most famous dissidents, to discuss Ukraine.
Alyokhina, known to her friends as Masha, was now crouched on the gallery’s floor, writing text in black marker on the wall. Her friend Kjartansson was standing on a nearby stool, using silver masking tape to write a title. None of the screens were switched on. The digital file of one video was still missing (it was eventually uploaded two minutes before the opening). People scurried back and forth as the clock wound down.
Pussy Riot is used to flying by the seats of its pants. The group’s members improvise. They agitate. If they hit an impediment, they pivot and push in another direction. They all but define urgency. Although known to many as a punk band, they are best understood as artists working in the tradition of performance art. More specifically, they’re political performance artists.
Of course, there’s political art and there’s political art. The first kind preaches to the converted. It usually involves arcane allusions to the grievances of an identity group and rarely reaches an audience outside the art world. The other kind dares to engage in the actual political arena. It is oppositional, offering clear statements grounded in personal conviction. It understands, through bitter experience, what’s at stake. And yet it’s made with exuberance, an embrace of the absurd and antic, undaunted joy.
The idea of a Pussy Riot retrospective hadn’t occurred to Alyokhina until about six months ago. The 34-year-old has an astringent, understated charisma. An unlikely amalgam of Sid Vicious, Greta Thunberg and Harry Houdini, she has been resisting Putin’s regime with humor, smarts and an indefatigable brand of radical innocence for most of her adult life.
Kjartansson first suggested the idea of mounting a retrospective in December, 2021. When, the following May, he and Sigurjónsdóttir showed her Kling & Bang, Alyokhina had only just escaped Russia, where she had been living under so-called “restriction of freedom,” a kind of house arrest. She got out disguised as a food courier, with help from Kjartansson and an undisclosed European government.
“I was quite skeptical,” said Alyokhina, sitting in Kling & Bang’s back office two days after the opening. Pussy Riot, she explained, performed street actions; a retrospective might kill their spirit.
But the war in Ukraine had changed her outlook on everything. “We gradually understood that we don’t want to just show the videos [of Pussy Riot actions]. We wanted to tell the history behind the actions and to explain how we came to this point of war.”
A mash-up of order and anarchy
ernational attention was “Punk Prayer,” a 2012 guerrilla-style performance of an anti-Putin song in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. That chaotic, clumsily filmed 51-second eruption of indignation led to a show trial and convictions on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Alyokhina and her friend Nadya Tolokonnikova spent two years in penal colonies. (A third participant, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released after an appeal court hearing after eight months in jail.)
The retrospective traces the stages of Russia’s descent, in the wake of “Punk Prayer,” into state-sanctioned violence and authoritarianism. (“We didn’t receive all the hell in one moment,” Alyokhina told me. “There was a road that led to it.”) The show’s layout is a deliberate mash-up of order and anarchy.
After the video of Pletner urinating on Putin’s portrait, the show introduces audiences to each of Pussy Riot’s actions in the order they happened, beginning with 2011’s “Kropotkin Vodka,” which took aim at conspicuous consumption in the new Russia, and “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protest,” a punk-style performance on the roof of a building in front of a Moscow detention center holding political prisoners.
Text written directly onto the exhibition walls explains not only the actions, but also who did them, the context and the consequences. In a kind of conceptual jujitsu, Pussy Riot has successfully turned every arrest, detention and beating into new proofs of the absurdity of the authorities.