Turner Carroll Gallery
725 Canyon Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.986.9800
turnercarrollgallery.com
info@turnercarrollgallery.com
©2024 Turner Carroll Gallery
Essay: Tonya Turner Carroll
Additional photographs:
MOLLYAPOP / IG: @molly.a.pop
Design: Brian Bixby
Still from film Putin’s Ashes, 2023“Putin’s weapon is war. My art is my weapon.”
- Nadya Tolokonnikova
Nadya Tolokonnikova’s art is her weapon against tyranny. Born in Siberia in 1989 at the very moment the door cracked open for artistic freedom, Tolokonnikova hurled herself into conceptual art at a young age as she saw the tide turning back toward authoritarianism. At 16 years of age, Tolokonnikova left Siberia for Moscow to study philosophy. As Russian society became increasingly oppressive, she fought for freedom of expression and formed the performance art group Voina (“war” in the Russian language). After experiencing misogyny within Voina, Tolokonnikova left the group and founded the feminist activist collective, Pussy Riot. Inspired by the American, feminist collective Guerilla Girls, Tolokonnikova chose the name Pussy Riot because she wanted to create an art collective that was simultaneously cute and dangerous.
Determined to shine a light on the Russian government’s increasing human rights violations and hypocrisy, Nadya and her collective used every means possible to broadcast their message with maximum impact. Her collective used microphones, electric guitars, and amplifiers they cobbled together from car speakers; they wore brightly colored minidresses and balaclavas; they shouted and danced. This artistic style resulted in some critics labeling Tolokonnikova as a punk rock musician. But in fact, she has always identified as a multimedia conceptual artist, utilizing any medium available to her at the time she creates her artworks.
Every time Tolokonnikova and her Pussy Riot collective staged an art protest in Russia, the police would arrive within thirty seconds to shut it down. Russian police have arrested Nadya Tolokonnikova more than 70 times for her anti-authoritarian art activism, and in 2012 was imprisoned for 21 months in a Russian jail and a Siberian penal colony. Rather than give up, Tolokonnikova fights back with truth and art. She exhibits her artworks throughout the world, and founded the opposition news outlet Mediazona which exposes the Russian government’s human rights abuses. Turner Carroll is pleased to premier Tolokonnikova’s new series, as well as to present her iconic Putin’s Ashes works and prison shivs.
Tolokonnikova’s total installation Putin’s Ashes is an artistic tour de force. Knowing that Vladimir Putin is superstitious and intimidated by magic and witchcraft, she created a work with those concepts front and center in her first original art film and score. Putin’s Ashes was exhibited at Dallas Contemporary. She gathered women who professed deep hatred of the tyrant, created a ritual in which they burned a large portrait of him, and then cast a spell on his ashes. She directed and starred in the filmed performance, then scooped up the resulting ashes with hand forged shivs, bottled them, and placed them on tiny shelves within her artworks. She framed these artworks in pink fur, using the sewing skills she was forced to learn in prison to sew police and military uniforms. Putin’s Ashes got under Putin’s skin so deeply that Russia declared Tolokonnikova a foreign agent and placed her on the equivalent of its most wanted criminal list. Refusing to be intimidated, Tolokonnikova addressed Putin directly in her recent Ted Talk: “From one wanted criminal to another, you have already lost. In your final hour, when you pray to whoever you pray to, know that she is on our side. She is on the side of truth.”
Nadya Tolokonnikova is the author of numerous books, her essays have been published in the New York Times, and she appeared before the British Parliament and met with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. She played herself in the television series House of Cards, appeared with Banksy in Dismaland, at the Tate Modern Museum in London with The Guerilla Girls, and is the subject of an upcoming television series. Additionally, Tolokonnikova delivered a TED talk in which she directly confronted Vladimir Putin, 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, Wende Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Contemporary, [CONTAINER] Santa Fe, OK Linz Museum in Austria, American Folk Art Museum, Taubman Museum of Art, The New Museum, Zimmerli Museum, Ackland Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, New Mexico Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Indiana State University Museum, Saatchi Gallery in London, and The Museum of Art and Design in New York. Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Dangerous Women, alongside Yoko Ono, Ana Mendietta.
At 34 years old, Nadya Tolokonnikova has already made artworks with the conceptual and technical maturity of an artist who has lived a full career. We are honored to collect her work and support her vision of a world where art can change society.
-Tonya Turner Carroll and Michael Carroll
CANCEL FEAR SERIES II, 2024, mixed media and wood, 48 x 36 x 2”
CANCEL FEAR SERIES III, 2024, mixed media and wood, 48 x 36 x 2”
CANCEL FEAR SERIES IV, 2024, mixed media and wood, 48 x 36 x 2”
Putin’s Ashes-100g, 2023, mixed media, 40 x 30”
Putin’s Ashes-30g, 2013, mixed media, 40 x 30”
Putin’s Ashes I, 2023, film still print on wove paper, 11 x 20”, edition of 250
Putin’s Ashes II, 2023, photographic print from original film still on aluminum, 20 x 37.9”, edition of 3
Putin’s Ashes III, 2023, photographic print from original film still on aluminum, 20 x 37.9”, edition of 3
Knife Play (Pink 27), 2023, mixed media, 20 x 16”
Knife Play (Black 9), 2023, mixed media, 20 x 16”
Knife Play (White 2), 2023, mixed media, 20 x 16”
Still from Nadya Tolokonnikova’s jail performance piece taken at the Mordovia Penal Colony (PC-14) while Nadya was on hunger strike protesting inhumane prison conditions.
