Nadya Tolokonnikova releases POLICE STATE

If your art collective is declared an “extremist organisation” by Vladimir Putin, you know you’re doing something right. Nadya Tolokonnikova, the founding member of Pussy Riot, served a two-year prison sentence following the group’s 2012 Punk Prayer performance. Since her release, her practice has expanded across music, performance, and exhibition-making, each inseparable from her activism.

This summer, Tolokonnikova staged a ten-day durational performance at MOCA in Los Angeles, reconstructing her Russian prison cell inside the museum. By a bitter and ironic twist of timing, the performance coincided with the eruption of anti-immigration raid protests across the city, as Trump ordered National Guard troops onto the streets. When MOCA closed its doors amid the unrest unfolding around the corner, Tolokonnikova refused to stop. For seven more days, she continued the performance alone in the emptied museum, live-streaming the sounds of protests outside directly into the cell.

This journey now takes material form in a 232-page book, titled POLICE STATE. The publication converges photographs, prison letters, etchings, works by fellow Russian political prisoners, and documentation of the ICE and No Kings Day protests unfolding beyond the museum walls. Importantly, the book is not merely an archive of events, but a lucid indictment of power: tracing parallels of police violence and state control, and exposing tactics of oppression the West is quick to project onto Russia while (not-so-)quietly reproducing at home.