Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot's Russia documents high-risk guerrilla performance in the face of tyranny
Balaclavas, urination, and punk rock: The Polygon Gallery brings exhibition celebrating group’s raucous acts of Putin protest to West Coast
From the action “Scarecrow”, 2022, at the Polygon Gallery’s new exhibition Velvet Terrorism. Photo by Andrey Zolotov
The Polygon Gallery presents Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia to June 2
AS FAR AS FIRST impressions go, it’s certainly a provocative one.
Practically the first thing you see upon entering the Polygon Gallery’s upstairs exhibition space is a large-scale looped video of Pussy Riot member Taso Pletner. Staring at the viewer defiantly from under one of the Moscow-based group’s trademark balaclavas, Pletner hikes up her dress and urinates on a portrait of Vladimir Putin.
The message isn’t exactly subtle, but then neither is Putin, whose blunt-force antipathy toward feminists, the LGBTQ2SIA+ community, and let’s face it—anyone who opposes his authoritarian rule gave Pussy Riot its very raison d'être.
“It’s an activist group, and their message has been consistently short and sharp, and they wanted to create that experience for audience members coming in to see the exhibition,” says the Polygon’s director, Reid Shier, who is responsible for bringing Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia to the North Vancouver gallery. “They didn’t want to pull any punches right off the bat, so you’re given an absolutely direct message right from the get-go.”
Equal parts performance-art troupe, punk-rock band, and activist collective, Pussy Riot formed in 2011 and quickly gained notoriety through a series of high-profile guerilla performances. Two of the most famous of these occurred in 2012: “Putin Peed His Pants” in Red Square, and “Punk Prayer”, staged at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Through the latter action, the group aimed to protest the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Putin during his election campaign.
Velvet Terrorism traces Pussy Riot’s often precarious trajectory from those raucous beginnings up to its most recent actions in opposition to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Because the group doesn’t make artworks so much as it creates ephemeral, heavily context-based moments, the exhibition is mostly documentation of those moments through photography and videos.
Shier argues that a piece like “Putin Peed His Pants” was intended to be viewed after the fact, which makes the recording and dissemination of the performance as important as the performance itself.
“It wasn’t done specifically for an audience that might have been around the square that one day,” he says. “It was filmed expressly to be posted on social media. So you’re already talking about something that is going into a second context, and going into a kind of distribution format. So the logic largely, in thinking about it being in an exhibition, was ‘Can it extend out into another context?’ They thought that was something that they could do, so the exhibition really tried to capture that ethos—the immediacy of it, but also the care and attention with which they want to bring that message to as many people as possible.”
There is, of course, significant peril inherent in so publicly calling out a despotic regime, which was made clear when, in the wake of “Punk Prayer”, Pussy Riot members Nadezhda “Nadya” Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria “Masha” Alyokhin were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. Samutsevich’s sentence was suspended, but the other two were slapped with two-year prison terms.
At the March 21 opening of Velvet Terrorism, Alyokhin led the assembled crowd on a suitably chaotic tour of the show. She described the “cynical” nature of the labour she and her fellow inmates were forced to do, which consisted of sewing police and military uniforms.
From the action “Punk Prayer”, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow, 2012. Photo by Mitya Aleshkovsky
The exhibition originated at Kling & Bang, an artist-run space in Reykjavik, Iceland, and it had subsequent runs in Montreal and Humlebaek, Denmark. That puts the Polygon in rarefied company, but Shier was determined to bring the show to North Van, almost from the first moment he read about it.
“There was a review of the show when it was at Kling & Bang that was published in the Guardian—I guess it was in about October last year—and I was really blown away by the sound of it,” he recalls. “I hadn’t read about an exhibition like that, ever. I knew somebody who knew one of the Icelandic curators, and I got her to introduce me and we started a conversation. Then I just bought a ticket and flew to Reykjavik to see the show, and luckily Masha was there. It was the last week of the exhibition. They were doing a kind of closing tour of the show, so that was fortunate. I just asked if we could bring it here [to the Polygon]. They were just starting plans for touring the exhibition at that point, so the timing worked out.”
Shier hopes that viewers will walk out of the show with an appreciation for just how much the members of Pussy Riot are willing to put on the line to get their message out, and all without ever losing the sheer joy of sticking it to the man in as loud and anarchic a way as possible.
“What struck me most was how much I didn’t know, and how consistently they had worked together as a group under growing pressure, including jail sentences and beatings and torture, to produce these works that remained consistently funny and brave and light, and how frankly incredible that is,” Shier says.
Speaking out against the Russian government doesn’t always end well for those with the courage to do it—just ask the family of Alexei Navalny. One of the most remarkable things about Alyokhin and her Pussy Riot comrades, Shier suggests, is that the risk only seems to make them more determined to keep pushing against the forces of tyranny.
“They put themselves into some pretty dangerous situations in Russia while they were there,” Shier says. “I think one of the driving forces behind their art and activism is consistently speaking out. I think for them to think about stopping this would be tantamount to giving in. And having gotten to know them all, I know that they’re not going to do that.” 
From the action “Careful, Fragile,” 2020. Photo by Pussy Riot
Related Articles
