Punk feminist group Pussy Riot is making its bid to take over the controversial Russia pavilion at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition of art by political prisoners.
The Russian art collective has been a vocal critic of Russia’s planned comeback to the global art event, which opens next month. Despite a tide of backlash from leading cultural institutions and policymakers, the Biennale’s organizers have supported Russia’s first exhibition since it dropped out in February 2022, just days after invading Ukraine. Pussy Riot is campaigning to oust the group show that will occupy Russia’s pavilion, replacing it with an alternative exhibition that would expose how the country is “once again turning into a gulag,” according to founder Nadya Tolokonnikova.
“Political prisoners are the best of Russians,” she said, adding that artists “trapped in this [prison] system” are the ones who are able to express its “fear and suffering.”
Anastasiya Dudyaeva, Book Cover. Image courtesy Art Action.
The proposed exhibition, “Resistance Imprisoned,” opened at Ritsche-Fisch Galerie in Strasbourg on April 19 and runs through May 31, the duration of the Biennale’s opening. It features work by nearly 30 artists who are currently still imprisoned in Russia, as well work by three former prisoners, and Alexander Dotsenko, a jewelry artist who recently died in jail.
The works have been amassed over time by Art Action, an organization founded by Tolokonnikova and her husband John Caldwell to support artists at risk. They were produced in the little free time that prisoners in Russia can find after doing hard labor.
“Means are very scarce,” Tolokonnikova explained in an email. “People paint on envelopes, on pieces of bedding covered in toothpaste as an improvised primer, or with their own blood.”
One of the artist’s whose drawings are on view is Anastasia Dyudyaeva, an art teacher who is serving a 3.5-year sentence for distributing postcards criticizing Vladimir Putin in support of Ukraine. Another is Jan Katelevsky, who received a 9.5-year sentence for journalistic work that police corruption in Moscow.
Pavel Krisevich, The judge and the prosecutor and laughing at the case. Image courtesy Art Action.
Lyudmila Razumova was arrested for anti-war graffiti in 2022, around the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She is serving seven years but two her drawings made in prison are included in “Resistance Imprisoned.” Pavel Krisevich, a performance artist who served nearly four years in prison and is now living in exile, painted with ink and blood onto his prison bed sheets.
Tolokonnikova’s vision for the pavilion was inspired by her own experience of spending nearly two years in a penal colony between 2012 and 2013. She had been arrested for “hooliganism” for participating in a “punk prayer” protest against Putin outside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
“When I was there, I dreamed that my voice would not be silenced,” she said. “For all of these prisoners, we pay attention to them and we don’t forget them. This is a sacred duty.”
The official exhibition being staged in the Russian pavilion this year is “The Tree is Rooted in the Sky,” a group show of more than 50 young musicians, poets, and philosophers from Russia and other countries. A stalwart of Venice’s Giardini, the stately, mint green pavilion sat empty during the Biennale in 2022 but was lent to Bolivia in 2024.
Jan Katelevsky, Everything will be alright. Image courtesy Art Action.
Since 2019, the Russia pavilion’s commissioner has been Anastasia Karneeva, former head of Christie’s Moscow and daughter of Nikolay Volobuyev, the current deputy chief executive of Rostec, a Russian state-owned defense contractor.
The Biennale’s decision to allow Russia to return this year has been viewed as a possible breach of E.U. sanctions against Russia. On April 10, the E.U. Commission’s Education and Culture Executive Agency sent a letter to the Biennale’s president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco requesting that he take corrective action by May 11 or risk losing a €2 million ($2.3 million) grant from the E.U. for the 62nd Biennale in 2028.
When Russia dropped out of the Biennale in 2022, the move was quickly followed by a statement from the event’s organizers claiming that it would “not accept the presence at any of its events of official delegations, institutions, or persons tied in any capacity to the Russian government.”
A change in leadership in the 2024 has seen the Biennale take a different position. In March, the Biennale’s organizers said they “reject any form of censorship in culture and art” in a statement, adding that “the Biennale, like the city of Venice, continues to be a place of dialogue, openness, and artistic freedom.”