Today, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar is joined by Nadya Tolokonnikova — conceptual artist, musician, activist, wanted criminal, and one of the founders of Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist protest-art collective formed in Moscow in 2011.
Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years in a Russian prison after Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance Punk Prayer inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour — an action that transformed a brief act of punk dissent into one of the defining works of political performance art of the 21st century. Since then, her work has continued to confront the spaces where power presents itself as untouchable: the church, the state, the prison system, the museum, the media image.
That history matters in Venice. A national pavilion at the Biennale is never just architecture. It is a state speaking through culture.
Last week, in May 2026, as Russia returned to the Venice Biennale for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Pussy Riot and FEMEN staged two connected protests. On May 6, they confronted the Russian Pavilion itself, using Ukrainian flags, pink balaclavas, smoke, flares, punk music, and slogans against Russia’s war. The action forced the pavilion to close temporarily.
On May 7, the confrontation moved from the pavilion to the institution that had allowed Russia back in. At Ca’ Giustinian, the headquarters of the Biennale Foundation, Tolokonnikova and the protesters challenged the Biennale’s leadership and its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, over the claim that culture can remain neutral while being used by the Russian state. Reuters reported that the demonstration continued from the previous day’s action at the Russian Pavilion and was redirected by police to the Biennale Foundation’s headquarters, where flares in the colours of Ukraine were ignited.
This continuity — from the cathedral in Moscow to the pavilion in Venice, and from the pavilion to the Biennale’s own leadership — sits at the centre of our conversation.
Tolokonnikova’s recent work has only sharpened this confrontation between art, punishment, and political theatre. Her 2023 performance and exhibition Putin’s Ashes, later shown at institutions and galleries including Dallas Contemporary, turned the image of Putin into ritual material and helped place her back on Russia’s wanted list. In 2025, POLICE STATE premiered at MOCA in Los Angeles as a durational performance and installation built around the architecture of confinement, before travelling to MCA Chicago later that year.
Her accolades include Time Woman of the Year, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the LennonOno Grant for Peace, the Woody Guthrie Prize, and an Honorary Doctorate from RISD. She also carries, as a kind of involuntary badge of honour, the Russian Federation’s 2025 designation of Pussy Riot as an extremist organisation — a reminder that, in authoritarian systems, art is not treated as metaphor when it threatens power. Reuters also reported that Pussy Riot was declared an extremist organisation and banned in Russia in 2025.
So this episode is about protest as art, culture as power, exile, propaganda, and the impossibility of neutrality when neutrality itself becomes a political position.
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