A Cell Built for Witnessing
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago unveils POLICE STATE, the Midwest premiere of Nadya Tolokonnikova’s newest performance installation—an uncompromising, visceral encounter with authoritarianism and the human will to create under pressure. Best known as a founding member of Pussy Riot, Tolokonnikova has spent more than a decade turning political resistance into art. With POLICE STATE, she transforms the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater into something far more claustrophobic: a cell that is part stage, part sanctuary, and part surveillance machine.
“POLICE STATE is a call to find light in the darkest places and to resist through creation.” —Nadya Tolokonnikova
Reconstructing Confinement
The installation echoes her own history. In 2012, after Pussy Riot’s now-canonical Punk Prayer, Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years in a Russian penal colony on fabricated charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” The conditions she endured—forced labor, isolation, unrelenting monitoring—form the foundation of this work.
Inside the MCA, she reenters that space, stitching garments for hours each day just as she did in prison. Her voice and breath shape an immersive soundscape that slips between lullaby and abrasion, inviting visitors into a world where creativity becomes a survival tactic.
“Freedom, to me, is the courage to stick to ideals and dreams in a world that's abandoned both.”
An Architecture of Surveillance
The cell is deliberately oppressive. Its walls are lined with reproductions of artworks created by currently and formerly incarcerated political prisoners across Russia, Belarus, and the United States—a reminder that the forces POLICE STATE critiques stretch far beyond Tolokonnikova’s own story.
A guard tower rises nearby. Video feeds display both live footage of the artist and archival images from Russian prisons. A neon emblem modeled after a Russian Orthodox cross glows red over the scene, both sacred and accusatory. Suspended above are works from Tolokonnikova’s Icon series, made from bedsheets produced in American and Belarusian prison industries—banners of quiet resistance.
The Audience as Participant (and Complicit Witness)
But the installation’s power doesn’t come only from the environment—it comes from the viewer’s role within it. Through peepholes arranged around the space, audiences watch Tolokonnikova work. They navigate architecture designed to make them complicit.
“The audience becomes part of the panoptic machine.”
Tolokonnikova cites Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, emphasizing that the installation is not merely observed—it's enacted through the audience’s choices. Watching becomes participating; surveillance becomes shared.
Power and Its Inversion
For Tolokonnikova, the symmetry between the powerful and the condemned is essential. She recalls being transported to prison after her sentencing, surrounded by a police motorcade.
“If you screw your eyes shut, there’s no difference between me and Putin—he gets sped through the city in his motorcade and I’m getting sped through the city in mine.”
This mirroring of subject and oppressor underscores the installation’s themes. In POLICE STATE, creation becomes defiance, and confinement becomes a site of radical imagining.
A Punk Faith for a Fractured World
Tolokonnikova frames her practice as a kind of spiritual resistance: a refusal to accept authoritarianism as inevitable.
“In a Hunger Games society, we’re stubborn enough to start a new religion—through art.”
The installation calls on viewers to examine their relationship to power, surveillance, and the illusion of safety. It is both a warning and a declaration that creativity can be a weapon—and a lifeline.
About the Artist
Nadya Tolokonnikova is a conceptual performance artist, activist, and founder of Pussy Riot, the international feminist art movement known for merging protest and performance. Her arrest following Punk Prayer became a global flashpoint; The Guardian later named the piece one of the landmark artworks of the 21st century.
Her 2023 installation Putin’s Ashes at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles triggered a new criminal case against her in Russia and placed her on the country’s most-wanted list. In 2024, she presented her debut museum exhibition RACE at OK Linz in Austria, alongside a performance at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Her work is held in major collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; the Brooklyn Museum; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and the American Folk Art Museum.
