As always, Nadya Tolokonnikova came to make some noise. At the Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, the founder of the Russian-born arts collective Pussy Riot opened a new exhibition called “Punk’s Not Dead” with a Saturday performance of her new noise band, Pussy Riot Siberia, making ear-blasting waves of industrial sound and screams against oppression.
The music was presented as an “Opera in 9 Acts,” and it unfolded like an unruly ritual, with Tolokonnikova standing behind a lectern in a long white cassock dress, her version of a Russian Orthodox cross hanging over her chest. The night began with the lighting of incense to undulating waves of feedback. Then came a piece of music called “Ancient Prayer to the Divine Feminine,” as Tolokonnikova added to the noise by loudly scraping a metal Russian police riot shield.
She was joined by musicians Max Lawton and Riley Bray, both wearing Pussy Riot’s traditional balaclava masks with X’s painted across the eye-holes, unleashing thundering sound on sequencers and bass guitar. Behind the band was a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, decorated with white flowers, silky ribbons, and brass knuckles.
The weeklong exhibition will close with another live performance at the gallery on Saturday, January 25. And Tolokonnikova will return again in May to present “Part 2” of the show.
The musical collaboration is named for the region where Tolokonnikova was imprisoned for nearly two years after a notorious 2012 protest against the Putin regime with a song called “A Punk Prayer.” In an interview before the performance, Tolokonnikova says she’s never considered herself a punk per se, but was drawn to its revolutionary spirit. “I look at punk as a culture of asking uncomfortable questions,” she says. “That is not any particular style of music or clothing. To me it’s bigger. It’s more like a mode of thinking.”
Pussy Riot Siberia is also an aesthetic shift from her last musical project, which had her singing politically charged messages to pop melodies and glitchy dance textures. In 2022, she released the Matriarchy Now mixtape—featuring tracks made with Tove Lo, Big Freedia and ILoveMakonnen—and appeared onstage at several festivals and venues in fishnets and platform shoes, brandishing a whip.
“I’m not a professional singer, so I was very self-conscious,” Tolokonnikova says now of that experience. “After jamming and rehearsing with Siberia, I realized that I can do much more than I thought I could. And I don’t need a backup track necessarily. It still could sound very awesome and loud. With Siberia, we sound different depending on our mood and on our interaction and it’s all about improvisation in real time.”
Last May, the group made its debut in New York at The Canvas 3.0 gallery, hosted by David Byrne. In Los Angeles, artist Shepard Fairey led a Q&A with Tolokonnikova just before their ear-shattering live set. He has been a close observer and friend to the Pussy Riot founder since her first visit to L.A. in 2014, shortly after her release from prison, and praised her work “as a performance artist, as an activist, as a musician, as a visual artist, and as a thinker. It’s all ideas-driven—and courageously ideas-driven.”
The original Pussy Riot collective used music, art, and guerrilla performance as tools of protest, and became known around the world after that one-song performance of “A Punk Prayer” inside Moscow’s Orthodox Christian cathedral in 2012. It was in protest of the increasing mingling of church and state. Tolokonnikova was one of two Pussy Riot members put on trial for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” leading to a nearly two-year prison stay in the Gulag. That prison sentence only amplified their message.
Music is just one means for her to communicate that purpose. On noisy electronics in Pussy Riot Siberia is Bray, who is also a cinematographer and collaborated with Tolokonnikova on an epic video piece that accompanied her last exhibition in L.A., “Putin’s Ashes” in 2023. Since all of her work is linked through her message, regardless of her style of expression in the moment, Pussy Riot Siberia performed a piece also called “Putin’ Ashes,” with lyrics sung in Russian and translated as: “We will find you everywhere / Your ashes are smoldering in the darkness.”
There was also a piece of music performed under the title “Intermezzo: Punk-Prayer,” connecting the present with that first action that got Pussy Riot in so much trouble a decade ago. On the walls were Tolokonnikova’s latest visual works: Russian police shields scratched up with messages and drawings of the anarchy symbol and tiny flowers. Nearby were large canvases covered with oversize Slavic calligraphy and her words of devotion about punk and protest.
“My prison experience was a long time ago, but I guess my fight with Putin’s regime is still very much ongoing,” Tolokonnikova says. “At this point it almost became a metaphor for this fight for freedom against an oppressive regime. And sometimes it’s just cute little things like flowers carved on the shields, because I want to bring a part of me that is not just always rough but also sometimes feminine and cute. I think cuteness and kindness will save the world.”
In December, her solo museum exhibition “Rage” in Linz, Austria, was attacked by vandals. One section of that show was dedicated to the installation Pussy Riot Sex Dolls, which rescued used sex dolls and redressed them as Pussy Riot-style figures in balaclavas and platform shoes. She found the second-hand dolls on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist and used them instead for “turning rage into beauty and turning rage into something constructive,” she says.
“Whenever I see one, I just want to dress her up and give her some dignity,” Tolokonnikova explains of the dolls. “I turned them into these powerful dominatrix figures that punish sex offenders. And I put them in a church because they’re holy.”
The dolls were displayed in a former chapel that is now part of the O.K. Linz museum (also known as O.K. Center for Contemporary Art), where the glass doors were shattered. She suspects religious motivation behind the attack. “I was expecting some complaints and they were happening all throughout the show, but that was pretty harsh,” the activist adds. “It wasn’t traumatic to me. I’ve been through worse.”
As for her current project, Pussy Riot Siberia hasn’t yet recorded its music or made plans to do so. Pussy Riot Siberia is music to be experienced live. After witnessing Saturday’s performance, Fairey noted, “That was more abrasive than Suicide and more droning than the Melvins, and I love being challenged like that.”
Pussy Riot Siberia will be performed mostly in non-traditional spaces like art galleries for the foreseeable future.
“For the art context, it’s a different type of crowd and different type of expectation. They’re open to something completely new. That’s why I want to stick to the art world,” she says. “And the art world also needs to be screamed at. They became too polished, too glamorous. I think there will be a lot of people who will come to the performance and will be completely disgusted by it. And I love this idea.”