Nadya Tolokonnikova tells the Guardian she felt she had ‘entered a wormhole’ when her police state exhibition was shut down – by the police state
Nadya Tolokonnikova, the co-founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, was sitting in a replica Russian prison cell in downtown Los Angeles when the police started shutting down the streets around the art museum.
Police helicopters hovered overhead. Somewhere, through a loudspeaker, an officer delivered a tinny order to disperse.
Tolokonnikova was only three and a half days into what was supposed to be a “durational performance” reenacting her two years as a political prisoner in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
But Donald Trump had ordered national guard troops into Los Angeles, over the objections of California’s governor, and the protests against immigration raids that Trump wanted to target were happening just a block from the gallery where Tolokonnikova was performing.
The Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) hastily decided to shut its doors. But Tolokonnikova, 35, whose political art has left her as a wanted criminal in Russia, chose to continue her performance inside the empty museum.
“Police State Exhibit Closed Today Due to the Police State,” she posted on Instagram.
The situation “felt like I had entered a wormhole,” Tolokonnikova told the Guardian the next day via email. She wanted to be out on the streets, but she decided to finish her performance while live-streaming audio of the protests outside into her prison cell. It felt important, she wrote, “not to bend to the whims of Ice or the national guard”.
Tolokonnikova was in Los Angeles to display a new performance piece called Police State, which includes a replica Russian prison cell like the ones in which she was incarcerated for nearly two years, including in the notorious penal colony IK-14 in Mordovia.
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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jun/15/pussy-riot-nadya-tolokonnikova-police-state
