Nadya Tolokonnikova / Pussy Riot | ORIGIN (PUSSY)

July 17 – August 23, 2024

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present ORIGIN (PUSSY), a series of new mixed-media works by performance artist and activist, Nadya Tolokonnikova, the creator of the global feminist movement Pussy Riot. In this body of work, Tolokonnikova expands her artmaking into physical objects, while continuing her guerrilla performance practice.

The series of eight works reflects on the origin of the world, and, in a direct reference to Gustav Courbet’s infamous “L’Origine du Monde,” features the artist’s vulva engraved on a dark wood surface. The artist, wearing Pussy Riot’s signature balaclava in a series of saturated photographs, peaks through a cross-shaped aperture in the engraving. 

This cross, which recurs in each work in ORIGIN (PUSSY), is Tolokonnikova’s take on the Orthodox Christian cross. “The church has a long-lasting legacy of controlling bodies of women and LGBTQ+ people, so I invented my own cross, a feminist cross,” says the artist. 

Following the 2012 performance of “Virgin Mary, Please Get Rid of Putin” in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, two members of Pussy Riot, including Tolokonnikova, served two years in Russian labor camps. Pussy Riot protested against the excessive entanglement between church and state, and against the church's deep desire to reduce the role of women to solely childbirth. 

Twelve years later, the state of reproductive rights across the world continues to decline with the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade.

In this continuing series Pussy Riot brings attention to the ongoing battle for reproductive rights in the United States, Russia, and abroad, and the artists’ role in political activism and engagement. 

Conceptual performance artist and activist Nadya Tolokonnikova is the creator of Pussy Riot, a global feminist art movement. She was sentenced in 2012 to 2 years' imprisonment following an anti-Putin performance Punk Prayer. Punk Prayer was named by The Guardian among the ‘best art pieces of the 21st century’.

Tolokonnikova's Putin’s Ashes art installation at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in January 2023 propelled her into a new criminal case and put on Russia’s most wanted criminal list. On June 21st, her debut museum exhibition RAGE, opened at OK Linz, Linz, Austria, and the eponymous performance piece performed at the Neue Nationalgalerie on July 4. 

Tolokonnikova's work is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Art and Design, American Folk Art Museum, and Taschen, among others.

News

Activism in Art: Panel Conversation with Nadya Tolokonnikova | Wednesday, July 17 at 6:30pm

artnet | ‘‘I Don’t Want to Give Up on Hope’: Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova on Creating Art in Exile’

artnet | ‘Pussy Riot Artist Presents New Exhibition on Russia, Prison, and Political Rage’