Nadya Tolokonnikova

Honor Fraser is pleased to present Punk's Not Dead (Part II), a solo exhibition of new work by Nadya Tolokonnikova, Siberian artist and founder of the feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot. Through her decades-long career Tolokonnikova has remained committed to developing new visual and performative languages of protest, spanning back to her early days in the art-activist group Voina (2007–2011) to her founding of Pussy Riot in 2012, and her continued defiance under the scrutiny of the Russian government following her release from prison in 2014.

Rooted in traditions of Russian avant-garde, Tolokonnikova’s artistic practice does not merely reflect the world — it seeks to alter it. Even in its most harrowing moments, her work carries a utopia-building impulse, offering space for the possibility of a transformed future, a never-ending Möbius strip of being, at times, naive and childlike, and at other times, harsh and excruciating.

Punk’s Not Dead Part II features works from several of Tolokonnikova’s ongoing series, including Icons where she subverts religious iconography, merging it with contemporary slogans and intimate poetry. In this series, the sacred and the profane collide—an act of defiance akin to those that led to her 2012 imprisonment by the Russian government and the Orthodox Church. Art critic and philosopher Boris Groys writes, “Tolokonnikova engages with Russian Orthodox imagery as a means of disrupting contemporary artistic conventions. She follows in the footsteps of Malevich, who similarly invoked icon painting as a radical gesture... Few artists today work in this lineage, but Tolokonnikova actively embraces it. She seeks the miraculous amid a world governed by strategy and reason.”

In her series titled, Something To Believe In, Tolokonnikova brings to light the role of Big Pharma in shaping contemporary ideology, through physical representations of aggressively normalized and widely consumed pharmaceuticals in the United States, these commonly used prescriptions include Ozempic, Viagra, Adderall, and Botox. Tolokonnikova’s series, Dark Matter, engraves the images of past interventions performed by Pussy Riot onto birch wood, coating them in black ink, transforming ephemeral moments of protest into lasting artifacts. The exhibition also includes Riot Shields, which Tolokonnikova refers to as relics from her performance residency at Honor Fraser this past January. These riot shields, originally used as musical instruments — were carved and marked with brass knuckles, the repeated action amplified through contact microphones — now standing as sculptural remnants of defiance and endurance.

Throughout the exhibition, Tolokonnikova continues to trace the interwoven dynamics of resistance, ritual, and radical imagination — channeling actions of protest into a language of transformation.

Nadya Tolokonnikova is a conceptual performance artist and activist and 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, and on the international wanted list, too. In 2024 her debut museum exhibition Rage, opened at Ok Linz, Linz, Austria, and the eponymous performance piece performed at the Neue National galerie in Berlin. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Rhode Island School of Art and Design, and received The Hannah Arendt Prize for Political thought. Her visual artworks have been exhibited or collected by The Brooklyn Museum, MoCA, Serpentine Galleries, Wende Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Ok Linz Museum in Austria, American Folk Art Museum, The New Museum, Zimmerli Museum, Ackland Museum of Art, The Museum of Art and Design in New York.