From the time she entered her prison cell Thursday morning (5 June), it only took Nadya Tolokonnikova, a co-founder of Pussy Riot, about 15 minutes to start screaming. It was a high-pitched guttural shriek—the sound of a wounded animal or, considering her particular history, a political prisoner who refuses to be silenced.
Soon after came the staccato buzzing of a police scanner and the soft cadences of a Russian lullaby, emanating from the same space: a mock prison cell at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) in Los Angeles, where Tolokonnikova is undertaking what she calls, with a nod to her mentor Marina Abramović, her first durational performance, Police State.
Nadya Tolokonnikova, POLICE STATE, 2025. Performance documentation from The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Photo © Jori Finkel
For the performance, which runs during museum hours until 15 June, the prominent activist-artist is creating a “soundscape” by layering music that she plays live with noise sampled from actual prisons and other tracks. She has to this end equipped her prison cell—the heart of a dark, moody installation at the museum’s Geffen location—with a pink toy piano, a synthesizer and laptop. She plans to release it all, around 80 hours worth of sound, as a single piece of very experimental music.
Apart from the musical instruments, the Police State cell resembles the Russian prisons where Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years, after being sentenced in 2012 along with two other Pussy Riot members for staging an anti-Putin guerilla protest in Moscow’s largest Orthodox Christian church. The museum cell has a metal bunk, a small toilet, and, reminiscent of her long days in a gulag making military uniforms, a small sewing machine.
Nadya Tolokonnikova, POLICE STATE, 2025. Performance documentation from The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Image by Yulia Shur, courtesy of Moca
To see inside, some visitors kneeled on the floor to watch an old-school television with a four-channel surveillance feed. Several church pews nearby offered slightly more comfortable (also ritualistic) viewing of the scene at large. (The altarpiece, if you will, is a tall red neon sculpture featuring an icon of her own design—part Russian Orthodox cross, part jagged scar—that figures prominently in her recent work.)
Other visitors pressed close to the steel cage of the prison cell, where large slits allow glimpses of Tolokonnikova, wearing an Adidas track suit in the same forest green as one of her former prison uniforms. Above her desk hang drawings that she commissioned from current Russian political prisoners. Visitors can also spot some graffiti, like a line scratched into the wall that says: “I didn’t survive to be polite.”
Nadya Tolokonnikova, POLICE STATE, 2025. Performance documentation from The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Photo © Jori Finkel
In the run-up to the performance, Tolokonnikova described Police State as a panopticon designed to call attention to fascist abuses of power in Russia and beyond. But as the performance started, with so many visitors whipping out cell phones to take videos for their Instagram reels, it also felt like a comment on the trap of celebrity. A high-profile activist-artist plays music in a prison of her own making and everyone tries to get a glimpse, as if she’s Taylor Swift. In either case, we are all implicated, complicit in our hunger-games-loving surveillance society—a dynamic that would have been even more dramatic had she been able to realise her idea (scrapped for liability reasons) to build a watchtower that visitors could climb, literally putting them in the position of hyper-vigilant prison guards.
Nadya Tolokonnikova, POLICE STATE, 2025. Performance documentation from The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Photo: Nadya Tolokonnikova
The opening-morning crowd included Moca curator Alex Sloane, who organised the project; Riley Bray, a musician who collaborates with Tolokonnikova under the rubric Pussy Riot Siberia and Roger Gastman, the street art curator. But there was strikingly little overlap with the bold-face names who attended the Moca gala in the same location last weekend.
In an Instagram post this week, Tolokonnikova described who she hoped to reach. “My audience?” she wrote. “School kids, graffiti writers, punk heads, those who lost their motherland to authoritarianism and are searching for a new home and new hope; girls who want to scream at to the top of her lungs; the forgotten, the excluded, the rejected, the heartbroken, the voided; those who live in and out of jails; those who want nothing more than to cry; and those who have no f-cks left to give.”
- Nadya Tolokonnikova: Police State, until 14 June, The Geffen Contemporary at Moca, Los Angeles
