LOS ANGELES — Police State, a 10-day durational efficiency by activist, artist, and Pussy Riot creator Nadya Tolokonnikova, transforms the cavernous warehouse of the Geffen Modern on the Museum of Modern Artwork, Los Angeles right into a website of carceral confinement and authorities surveillance.
Since final Thursday, June 5, Tolokonnikova has occupied a recreation of a colorless, Russian jail cell in the course of the museum’s open hours, and can proceed to take action via this Saturday, June 14. Via small peepholes within the corrugated steel construction, the general public can watch as she creates soundscapes that echo via the house, remixing varied sources together with recordings from precise prisons, a stay LA Police scanner feed, and her personal heartbeat, filtered via a heart-monitor synth fabricated by collaborator Riley Bray.
Tolokonnikova spent almost two years in a Russian jail after being convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for Pussy Riot’s 2012 anti-Putin efficiency “Punk Prayer,” which passed off in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. She was shuffled between roughly a dozen prisons and went on a starvation strike earlier than being launched in December 2013. She based mostly the design for the cell at MOCA, which features a mattress, rest room, and stitching machine, on her personal expertise of incarceration, in addition to accounts from different prisoners, calling it a “platonic ideal” of a jail cell. The partitions of the cell are coated with art work by almost 30 present and former political prisoners she invited to contribute to the present, together with Anna Bazhutova, Polina Yevtushenko, Zhenya Makarenko, and Oleg Navalny.
Set up view of Nadya Tolokonnikova: Police State
After Tolokonnikova burned a portrait of Vladimir Putin as a part of “Putin’s Ashes,” a 2023 set up at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles, she was positioned on Russia’s record of most wished criminals. “I constantly think about prison — it’s not something that’s in my distant past,” she stated. “I have numerous criminal cases against me, my travels are restricted. My life is quite literally in very real danger.”
At MOCA, the cell is positioned within the heart of the warehouse, as a duplicate guard tower stands watch, its glowing prime bearing textual content studying “Big Smile for the Camera / It’s Always On” and “No Problems in Paradise / We’ll Lock Them Up.” Video performs on two screens: one that includes video taken inside Russian prisons, one other streaming footage from 4 safety cameras positioned contained in the cell.
“I want people to feel like they’re very viscerally inside of a prison,” Tolokonnikova instructed Hyperallergic shortly earlier than the exhibition opened. “I want the audience to be taking on the role of a prison guard in a way, to disturb them. Why not? That’s what art does.”
Set up view of Nadya Tolokonnikova: Police State
On one aspect of the cell, gumball machines stuffed with colourful balls bear the names of poisons generally utilized by the Russian authorities to silence critics, together with Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny, a pal and mentor to Tolokonnikova, who died in jail final yr whereas serving a 19-year sentence. The machines are flanked by two of her “icon” work, which mix Cyrillic calligraphy with stylized depictions of feminine faces, typically carrying Pussy Riot’s signature balaclavas. Banners bearing the slogan “Punk’s Not Dead” — the title of a latest two-part exhibition at Honor Fraser Gallery — flutter in entrance of followers.
As guests enter the house, they encounter a big, glowing Russian Orthodox Cross hanging from the ceiling in entrance of a financial institution of church pews, offering an uplifting, non secular ingredient. “This is a site of both confinement and liberation,” MOCA affiliate curator Alex Sloane instructed Hyperallergic. “The cell is also a sanctuary.” This duality is echoed within the soundscapes, starting from aggressive noise to rumbling, ambient dirges, and Russian lullabies, which Tolokonnikova performs stay on a toy piano.
Set up view of Nadya Tolokonnikova: Police State
On Sunday, because the Nationwide Guard arrived in LA, MOCA determined to shut the Geffen Modern location early “out of an abundance of caution and for the safety and well-being of our staff and visitors.” Tolokonnikova selected to stay within the empty museum and proceed her efficiency, mixing in audio of the protests simply exterior the partitions. “Durational performance is a scary thing to step into: Once you say you’re going to show up, you can’t just leave simply because the National Guard has a whim to occupy the city, so my choice was to stay and continue doing my job as an artist,” she instructed Hyperallergic.
Since Pussy Riot’s first efficiency, Tolokonnikova’s observe has deftly merged artwork and activism, media and mayhem, difficult corruption, exposing injustice, and railing in opposition to oppressive energy constructions with an incendiary however finely tuned message. As her profile within the artwork world rises, she finds herself in institutional settings that ostensibly help progressive insurance policies however typically suppress dissent, to not point out “riots,” within the identify of order. Can her abrasive, radical ethos coexist throughout the relative consolation and security of the museum? “When you have a coup happening in front of your eyes in your country, an autocratic takeover of power, I don’t think it’s really time to think about safe spaces,” she stated. “It’s time to try to save your ass, and save the freedoms that you still have.”
Nadya Tolokonnikova exterior the Geffen Modern at MOCA, June 6, 2025 (picture by John Caldwell, courtesy Pussy Riot)
Set up view of Nadya Tolokonnikova: Police State
Set up view of Nadya Tolokonnikova: Police State
