Archives August 2024

Nadya Tolokonnikova isn’t one to dither. Known best as a co-founder of Pussy Riot, she has—after being released from prison, where she was sentenced to two years on charges of “hooliganism” due to her part in Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” protest at a Moscow cathedral—founded a nonprofit to track human-rights abuses in Russia’s prisons; founded an independent Russian news organization, Mediazona, later demonized by Vladimir Putin’s administration as a “foreign agent”; designed an (ongoing) clothing and accessories collection; written an inspirational and righteous autobiography and guide to activism; become something of a pop star; and married a thought leader in the Web3 space.

More recently, though—betwixt and between continued political actions—Tolokonnikova has been prioritizing the art practice that’s at the root of virtually everything she’s done. “Rage,” the first museum show of her contemporary visual and performance work, opens tomorrow at OK Linz, a contemporary art space in Linz, Austria. (It’s on through October 20.)

The exhibition, curated by Michaela Seiser and Julia Staudach, unfolds over two floors and includes 11 works in Tolokonnikova’s Icons series of acrylic calligraphy on canvas; six works in her Dark Matter series, which incorporates calligraphy and symbols loosely based on the orthodox cross; her prison archive; a video archive of Pussy Riot actions including “Punk Prayer”; a very recent work involving reclaimed sex dolls; a replica of her Siberian prison cell; and five art films—including, perhaps most notably, “Putin’s Ashes,” which debuted last year at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, was just acquired for the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and is making its European debut at OK Linz.

The first room, “Rage Chapel,” features the works from the Icons series—among them, the triptych My Motherland Loves Me and I Love My Motherland, a reference to both Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me and Oleg Kulik’s I Bite America and America Bites Me—as well as Pussy Riot’s 2014 action at the Sochi Olympics, “Putin Will Teach You How to Love the Motherland,” which saw Tolokonnikova and her fellow performers beaten, whipped, and thrown to the ground by Cossack militia. The second room is centered around “Putin’s Ashes,” an installation based on a 2022 performance in an anonymous location which featured 12 Pussy Riot participants from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus burning a 10-foot-tall portrait of Vladimir Putin, with the ashes later bottled and labeled. Hanging above the staircase leading to the second floor is a monumental engraved knife, Damocles Sword, along with three tall velvet banners, with Tolokonnikova’s calligraphy repeating a kind of incantation: “Love is stronger than death.” (Another triptych, Love Is Stronger Than Fear, is dedicated to Tolokonnikova’s friend and colleague Alexey Navalny, who was murdered in a Russian penal colony in February.)

It’s always a pleasure to see Jay-Z—largely because it might mean Beyoncé is somewhere in the room—but his appearance at the 2024 Tony Awards was particularly exciting. Sure, he and Alicia Keys have performed “Empire State of Mind” live together before, but hearing the singers unite on the Grammy-winning song at the Tonys felt like a fitting tribute to Hell’s Kitchen, the award show’s New York City setting, and, indeed, to the New York institution that is Broadway.

The energy of the song—which followed host Ariana DeBose’s opening performance of an original song called “This Party’s for You”—was undaunted by the fact that Jay-Z technically joined the song via video feed from the David H. Koch Theater’s lobby (a fact that did not go unnoticed on social media). Nevertheless, the performance was undeniably fun and brought a welcome note of hometown pride to the proceedings, which have been challenged in past years by COVID closures on Broadway and a WGA strike that forced last year’s Tonys ceremony to go unscripted.

There’s a pleasing ease and sensuousness to “Trinket,” Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. That comes from not only its primary materials—millions of tiny glass beads, made on the nearby island of Murano (where glass has been produced for at least six centuries) and then strung into sweeping curtains lining the structure—but also its soothing arrangement of colors that shift from gradient to imperceptible depending on your vantage point: pale yellow, sunset orange, white, maroon, and the rare, prized cobalt draped across the building’s exterior, quivering with the breeze off the Venetian Lagoon.

This immersive environment, covering the pavilion’s interior and exterior, brings an expansiveness (and sheer beauty) to surely one of the smallest pavilions in the Giardini—and installations with such alluring aesthetic qualities are frankly rare on these grounds of late. “So much of contemporary art is ugly,” a fellow critic remarks as we appreciatively survey the installation. Before I can consider that pith, I overhear a guard sharply admonish a visitor for accidentally brushing a bead curtain: “The beads are all made by hand and strung by hand—all by hand!”

Underscoring this preciousness is the fact that Canadian-born, Paris-based Kiwanga—the first Black woman artist selected for the country’s pavilion—considers the various materials she works with as documents or witnesses, bearers of histories, economies, and culture. Research is at the heart of her practice; she estimates her process is 70% research and 30% production.

In “Trinket,” the miniature seed beads, or conterie, pack a rich history dating back to the 15th century, when they spread from Murano via commerce routes linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Besides acting as currency in some communities (conterie is derived from the word for counting), the glass beads became part of material cultures in these far-flung places, appearing in jewelry and clothes and acquiring important ritual, aesthetic, and symbolic value. The exhibition explores this network of trade, power structures, influences, and cultural exchange and examines disparities in how seed beads were perceived and the value assigned to them (European traders, for example, considered them mere trinkets), while also reflecting on the enduring legacy of the transoceanic trade.