Artists

Nadya Tolokonnikova

Press release

Nadya Tolokonnikova is many things. Dissident and pop star, conceptual artist and punk. But above all, she is one thing: an iconoclast who creates icons of her own. A contradiction. That contradiction sits at the center of her exhibition here in Cologne. What does it actually mean? Let's start with one side of it: iconoclasm. In Tolokonnikova's art, the term is to be taken literally. It targets icons—those of the Orthodox Church, and those of Russian state ideology: the cult of Putin. Back in 2012, Tolokonnikova and Pussy Riot staged one of their "Punk Prayer" performances inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the greatest shrine of Russian Orthodoxy, itself deeply subservient to the Kremlin. A desecration of symbols of authority, one might say, that led to Tolokonnikova's exile and her nearly two-year imprisonment in a penal labor camp in Mordovia. In 2023, already living in exile, came PUTIN'S ASHES, a video performance in which she and a group of masked women burned a propaganda portrait of the dictator, eventually offering the ashes for sale as heretical relics. She was punished for that, too. By then, the Russian state, waging its war of aggression against Ukraine, had placed Tolokonnikova on its international wanted list. And now, in Cologne, in 2026? Her activist impulse migrates onto canvases and objects. The most explicit acts of iconoclasm appear in works such as SACRED CORNER—Orthodox icon reliefs from which Tolokonnikova has cut out the saints—or DUST (CABINET) and I DIDN'T SURVIVE TO BE POLITE (RELIEF), in which she either incinerates pages of Holy Scripture or glues them into a relief resembling a dirty, wrinkled blanket. More delicate is the destructive game she plays with icons in her paintings. In works such as MOLOTOV SERVED, CHERNOBYL, and SYMBOL OF FAITH, it is the inconspicuous backgrounds, the very surfaces of the canvases, coated in fake silver leaf, that invoke the tradition of Russian Orthodox icon painting. In place of the saints who would normally occupy them, however, come images and symbols that can be understood as counter-images to what the anti-liberal fanatic Alexander Dugin once called russkiy mir—the "Russian world." They are counter-images to Russia's murderous imperial fantasy. And, by virtue of their motifs and their simple visual language, they are themselves icons. Alternative icons. That is precisely where their contradiction with iconoclasm lies. At first glance, these counter-images seem banal; as simple and immediately legible as the holy icons they have toppled from their thrones—or, better yet, ripped from their frames: Tolokonnikova's face in extreme close-up; Molotov cocktails presented like Orthodox Christian insignia; a child's doll abandoned in the nuclear wasteland of Chernobyl; the McDonald's sign beside the onion-domed church tower. Tolokonnikova's icons become worthy of artistic worship only through the manner of their representation: the ghostly, schematic quality that recalls the coal-black traces of photographic negatives and the abstracting contrasts of the Kharkiv School of Photography; the marks left in the material, the artifacts of their making, that disrupt the image's iconic simplicity. Taken together, these elements produce a distinctly negative, yet mystical image. As a counter-image, it functions like a dark but truthful funhouse mirror of Russian ideology and its imagery. And then there is something else lurking inside these images and their contradictions. Something that may, in fact, even resolve the contradiction altogether. Roland Barthes once wrote that "Pop Art reverses values," citing Roy Lichtenstein as his witness, who said: "What characterizes pop is mainly its use of what is despised." Pop Art, then, is blasphemous criticism and affirmation at once—a description that applies equally well to the contradiction at the heart of Tolokonnikova's images. They are Pop Art in the best sense. One could be even more precise: Tolokonnikova belongs to the tradition of what Boris Groys once called Sots Art, the Soviet counterpart to Western Pop Art of the 1980s. It emerged around exiled artists such as Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who, from New York, turned their painterly appropriations of icons against the consumerism of the West as well as the agitprop and Orthodoxy of Soviet Russia. All of them share one thing: a desire to make the untouchably sacred—the bling-bling of power—profane again. By its own means. Which brings me to the final, and not quite so profane, quality of Tolokonnikova's exhibition: magic. Or, as she herself once put it, not entirely without irony: her "punk witchcraft." Because alongside the devaluing appropriation of symbols of power, there is another form of appropriation at work in her pieces. Through her images, Tolokonnikova also reclaims the power to define her own history of persecution. In her museum debut, RAGE, shown at OK Linz in 2024, and in WANTED, her first solo show at Nagel Draxler in Berlin last year, this took the form of a reconstruction of her prison cell as an immersive installation—clinically inventoried, almost like a work by Joseph Kosuth. Now, in Cologne, it is the seemingly banal depiction of her cell, or her self-staging as a state enemy and avenging angel. What she puts on display through this form of appropriation is not alone the profanity of the power that made her a pariah. It is the magical, subversive force of her own trivial icons – her counterpower. A line of text behind one of the removed saints in SACRED CORNER describes that force rather well: "This art puts you on Russia's most wanted list." In a way, this also makes Tolokonnikova an alchemist. From the ideological garbage of the regime, from its profane materials, she amalgamates the gold of her art: her subversive wit. The internal contradiction between iconoclasm and iconophilia that I placed at the beginning of this text dissolves and is transformed into a screaming contradiction with the outside world—with the Russian World. Nadya Tolokonnikova is many things, yes. Also, a pop-and-punk alchemist. – Jonathan Guggenberger