The first thing you see is a framed portrait of Vladimir Putin propped against a table. The Russian leader looks like a secular icon, like Lenin in his mausoleum, seemingly incapable of human expression. But this being a video installation, there is more. Standing on the table is figure in a long gown and orange balaclava, like Rasputin in women’s clothes, or a very unorthodox priest. The figure raises their skirts and a jet of urine spurts over the portrait.
Welcome to Reykjavík and to Velvet Terrorism, an exhibition tracing the decade-long history of Russian art collective Pussy Riot. “Is that you?” I ask Maria Alyokhina, AKA Masha, pointing at the masked urinator? The Pussy Riot co-founder has been showing me, over a video conferencing app, around the exhibition she and members of Icelandic art collective Kling & Bang (Dorothee Kirch, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir and Ragnar Kjartansson) are installing. Kjartansson, who earlier this year helped Alyokhina flee Russia, holds the phone and gives me a view of Alyokhina at work.
“It’s not me,” says Alyokhina, thin smile below intense eyes. “It’s a new member of Pussy Riot who joined earlier this year.” By way of context, she adds: “Putin’s Russia has no women in power. Putin surrounds himself with men. The women are to stay at home and accept their role, which is to be protected. I don’t want to be protected by him. I’d rather piss on him.” Kjartansson, unseen, chips in: “It’s such a great take down of the patriarchy. We were assembling a very slick exhibition, tracing the history of Pussy Riot in the past decade. Then Masha arrived and made it very rock’n’roll.”
Photos are stuck to the wall with coloured electrical tape. TV monitors howl footage of the various performances and beatings the collective have undergone, such as the time in 2014 when Alyokhina and other members were whipped and pepper-sprayed by Cossacks for protesting at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The look of the show now has a punk sensibility fitting for a collective whose first songs, 2011’s Ubey Seksista (Kill the Sexist) and Osvobodi Bruschatku (Release the Cobblestones), sampled two late 70s British punk classics: the Cockney Rejects’ I’m Not a Fool and the Angelic Upstarts’ Police Oppression.
When I first meet Alyokhina, she is scribbling text on the gallery wall with what looks like a sharpie. She is writing, in English, an explanation of video footage showing Pussy Riot’s breakthrough performance in January 2012 in Moscow’s Red Square. That day they played a song called Putin Zassal (here rendered as Putin Pissed His Pants), which included the lines: “The Orthodox religion is a hardened penis / Coercing its subjects to accept conformity.”
The next exhibit documents what happened the following month inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Russia was then embroiled in the so-called “snow revolution” against electoral fraud. Alyokhina and four other women smuggled a guitar and amp into the cathedral, donned balaclavas and coloured tights, and performed their Punk Prayer, with lyrics including “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out”, and “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist”.
Alyokhina and other members of the collective were later jailed for inciting religious hatred after the prosecution – incredibly yet successfully – argued that feminism when proclaimed inside a church is heretical.
During Alyokhina’s 21-month incarceration in a penal colony in the Ural mountains, Putin’s ally and head of the Russian Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, explained what was expected of women in Putin’s Russia. “Man has his gaze turned outward – he must work, make money – and woman must be focused inwards, where her children are, where her home is. If this incredibly important function of women is destroyed then everything will be destroyed – the family and, if you wish, the motherland.” The message was clear: difficult women like Pussy Riot needed silencing to save the Russian motherland.
Alyokhina won’t be silenced, though she balks when I suggest that western artists aren’t as tough nor as political as she. This is a woman, after all, who while awaiting sentence released a single defiantly proclaiming: “Seven years isn’t enough – give us 18!” Later, while in jail, she organised impromptu uprisings and would go on to say: “This is what protest should be: desperate, sudden and joyous.”
This spring, after being arrested six times since last summer for protesting against Putin and suspecting another spell in jail was likely, Alyokhina, with girlfriend Lucy Shtein and other members of Pussy Riot, fled Russia disguised as food couriers. Shtein is now in Israel, while Alyokhina and other collective members are nomadic, and have spent much of their time since leaving Russia touring Europe to raise money to support Ukraine and sanctions on Russian oil and gas.
Kjartansson calls me later and we speak alone. “I couldn’t say all I wanted about how great Masha is,” he says. “It’s like talking about Elvis in the presence of Elvis.” A longtime Pussy Riot fan, Kjartansson met Alyokhina last December at the grand opening of billionaire Leonid Mikhelson’s GES-2 art space in Moscow, which for a few months was hailed as a symbol of a new Russia.
Kjartansson’s recreation of the US soap Santa Barbara was the gallery’s inaugural attraction. It was a project inspired by the idea that Santa Barbara, the first US soap opera to be screened in Russia, had a powerful impact on post-Soviet culture. To that end, working with a professional film crew, he planned to stage, shoot and release about 100 episodes of the soap in Russian, on an insanely tight schedule of one episode a day performed in the gallery.
“But then the invasion of Ukraine started,” he explains, “and I didn’t want any part of what Russia was doing. So I withdrew.” He wasn’t alone. Teresa Iarocci Mavica quit as director of GES-2.
Kjartansson has since put his energies into this Pussy Riot exhibition. He wants to show the chutzpah of the collective in turning the power of the oppressors against them, making Putin’s thugs and lackeys part of their work. “Be it prison, novichok, whips, ankle tags or exile,” says the show’s publicity material, “Pussy Riot turn every violent action of the state into art material, shifting the power balance.”
I ask Alyokhina when she will go home. “A good question,” she smiles sadly. “I don’t know. I would like to be there. I miss my home. But not what Putin has done to it.”
Velvet Terrorism runs until 15 January
