Nadya Tolokonnikova, the founder of Russian artist 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 .
Russian media Mediazone discovered yesterday that Tolokonnikova is now listed in the Russian Interior Ministry database and faces criminal charges, although the entry does not specify what the charges are. In response, Tolokonnikova said in a statement: “They are threatening us but we cannot show fear. I will use the tools I have as an artist and crypto enthusiast to keep fighting. I am not a soldier, I am an artist, art is my weapon. Glad to see they’re scared.”
Tolokonnikova’s criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his increasingly excessive attempts at censorship and oppression go 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” for an improvised concert, titled punk prayerat the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which urged 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 setting fire to a three-meter portrait of Putin in the desert. Tolokonnikova bottled the ashes of her burnt portrait and displayed them along with the short film at her first solo exhibition at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles in January.
“[Putin] probably didn’t like it […] I guess we got enough attention to scare him off as we rallied allies in the West who were ready to stand up to Putin and also help Ukraine,” Tolokonnikova said.
Less than a week after the Los Angeles show opened, Tolokonnikova said her Instagram account “coincidentally” disappeared and the new criminal case was announced. “The police detained friends and family, and my lawyers sent me the documents they found,” she adds.
Russian government court documents also refer to an NFT Tolokonnikova released in 2021, titled Virgin Mary, become a feminist please (a line drawn from punk prayer). According to the legal documents, the NFT, which includes an image of the Virgin Mary drawn in the form of a vagina, is “an expression of clear disrespect to the image of the icon 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 newspapers claim, “thus expresses a lack of respect, a contempt for the image venerated in the Christianity”.
Tolokonnikova thinks this could be the “first time an NFT’s art has been used as evidence to try to throw someone in jail.”
Talk to The arts journal when releasing NFT in 2021, the artist and activist noted how she had “chose this battle” to bring “more positivity, acceptance and democratic rights to the world”, adding, “It just doesn’t stop not with Putin. We face systemic oppression, it’s a global problem.
