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Most recently, along with the other members of Pussy Riot, she conducted a highly subversive work of performance art where a portrait of President Putin was burned and the ashes from the fire collected in small vials. Now this piece, titled Putin’s Ashes, will be incorporated into Pussy Riot’s debut fine art exhibition in Santa Fe, at the CONTAINER hybrid-museum outpost of the world-renowned Turner Carroll Gallery.
office caught up with Tolokonnikova ahead of Pussy Riot’s fine art debut this week.
Relics and rituals seem to take center stage in your artwork. Can you tell me the role that these practices and artifacts have in the message of your art?
There’s a school of thought that says that the performance artist is the new Shaman. Our roles might be very similar - we work with intentionality, manifesting, and summoning the power of a collective of people coming together and desiring something. The oldest form of song is prayer, and Pussy Riot’s most known art piece is a punk prayer: the one we performed in the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 2012. We asked our Goddess to help us to get rid of Putin. We knew that if he’s not out of power, terrible things will happen to our beloved country. Today, in 2023, more people than ever join Pussy Riot in our punk prayer, including the International Criminal Court in Hague.
How has this inflective spirituality influenced the performance seen in Putin’s Ashes?
I work a lot with desire, intention, dreaming and making dreams come true, utopian thinking, political imagination combined with a will and persistence to fulfill what you have imagined. I also try to understand all the forces that stop you from fulfilling your dreams and desires - fear, apathy, depression, dictatorships, physical and mental injuries, imprisonments, PTSD, lack of confidence, censorship - and especially self-censorship. As Dostoevsky put it, “Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.” Each one of us is a sum of these vectors pulling us in opposite directions, and ultimately it’s up to you to decide to which side you will surrender. I choose to overcome my fear. I choose to remain naive and idealistic and keep fighting for what’s right. I refuse to become cynical. I believe that even one person can change the world. I believe in the power of collective action. That’s what we tried to achieve with Putin’s Ashes.
Have you encountered any other artists emerging to support your collective in your fight?
Bono, a fellow freedom fighter and fierce activist, contributed a soundscape for my new sculpture “HAUNTED!”, in “HAUNTED!” I talk about my PTSD and my will to overcome it, and Bono beautifully said that like an alchemist, I transform rage into beauty. “Turning my rage into beauty. My beauty into rage.” The incorporation of your Freedom Certificate is a poignant addition to your latest exhibition.
What does that artifact mean to you, especially in light of the view that for many in similar positions, the freedom granted by such a certificate is highly conditional if they choose to remain in their homeland?
My Freedom Certificate was given to me when I was at the lowest point in my life. I was a shell of my former self and I didn’t know how to come back alive. Creating art based on my traumatic experience helps me to overcome this pain. Of course, all freedom is conditional, and even though I was beaten repeatedly and had cruel punishments such as acid thrown in my face, after my release, I felt deeply grateful to be outside of the prison walls. As someone often billed as a protest artist, how do you feel about your increasing mainstream reception in the fine arts world? I feel honored and grateful every time I’m lucky enough to find allies who’re willing to support my difficult path as a political artist. Allies like Tonya Turner, Michael Carroll, Jeffrey Deitch, Judy Chicago, Jenny Holzer, Marina Abramovic, are priceless to me.
Hello! What's up? How are you?
I'm okay. I'm just sat on the porch of this house in Seattle. We just played a radio session this morning.
I'm sitting on a porch in New York right now.
Oh, no way.
Yeah! So I listened to your latest project An Inbuilt Fault and I have to ask, are you okay?
I'm okay. I think there's a lot of different feelings involved in the record but I suppose some of them are dreary. It comes from a quite disturbing time which was the collective experience of Covid and I wanted to engage with that.
The process of making the records has definitely helped dispel a lot of those feelings of alienation and isolation.
For sure, I also called the number on your Instagram at 1570533lens and got a message in return. What's that about?
Which message did you listen to? They change.
The one about hanging in there and accepting your feelings.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I must confess, I usually do these kind of things on the fly and try not to think about them too much, but that does sound like something I might have said.
If you could time travel to any era in music history, when would it be and why?
Oh, that's a really good question. I think I’d like to be in the late 1970s during the time period where techno and electronic technology was developing at an incredible pace.
I think that's still happening now, but I'm interested in the novelty of that being a new thing, the emergence of computers as a tool to manipulate sound.
I saw that your album cover was inspired by an AI image? What's your take on musicians using AI?
Ultimately, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about any form of technology. It’s inevitable that the human mind reaches for new planes. I think for creative thinkers, AI will just be another tool and it’ll lead to fantastic music which wouldn't have been possible without it. But, I also think it will lead to a lot of very lazy music too.
Your album before this was titled Your Hero Is Not Dead? Do you have a hero?
Oh. Who are my heroes? Currently, I don’t have any. I think that the whole kind of nature of heroic characters is based on projection. I wanted to interrogate what that means and show that these qualities and traits are accessible within ourselves if we look for them. In terms of my heroes, musically speaking, I have a lot of people who's music I like. I like Joni Mitchell's music a lot, but I don't know if she's my hero. It's a hard one. Sorry, my mind goes a bit blank. It's like asking someone what's your favorite film.
As a fellow Joni Mitchell fan, I'm curious. What's your favorite song of hers?
There's so many. I think the song that I probably listened to the most over the last few years is called “The Magdalene Laundries” which is an incredibly sad song, but it's full of compassion.
It's sad in the right way. What's your favorite Joni Mitchell song?
I'd say my favorite is “Both Sides Now”. How would you say your sound has evolved since Call And Response?
I think that there's a larger scale of ideas that have opened up since I’ve learned how to arrange a bit more by myself. I have more clarity of thought through focusing on things other than just the lyrics and melody.
This record breathes more, it was mostly recorded with live takes and it’s less sculpted. It’s a lot more of an alive and amorphous thing.
What was it like collaborating with Luke Temple and James Krivchenia on this album?
It was great. Yeah, Luke's one of the players on the record and there were some other fantastic players. How it kind of came about was that I'd met James before the pandemic. I knew when I was demoing this record that I really wanted to have life and passion be central elements in it. A friend of mine floated the idea of working with James. So we started talking on Zoom and just trying to feel out whether or not there was something to be made. I just kind of took the plunge.
I made the record in LA, playing with all of these people who I didn't know at all. It felt like a good way of breaking out of the kind of solipsism that came with the writing process. We smashed the songs open and let people interpret and feel it, they added things I never would have thought about.
How did you choose the visuals for the album?
I was working with this visual artist called Edwin Burdis. I struggle with music videos, I often find them superfluous. I didn't really want to make them, but then I started talking with Edwin and he was telling me about his new process.
So basically, I just sent a lot of footage, footage that I had made and found footage. Between the two of us we kind of collaboratively started putting these things through algorithms and then editing them ourselves into a sort of collage thing. I think of it as an accompaniment really.
It honestly has amazing song titles. How did you come up with them?
I don't know. I find song titles quite difficult. Sometimes they kind of present themselves immediately. Sometimes there's an obvious word or line in the song which stands out and then you think, oh, that's easy.
And then other times there isn't one. Sometimes there's things which make me laugh. I kind of try and leave it to the unconscious.
What was your favorite part of working on the project?
It sounds kind of absurd but my favorite part was just the fact that I was making something again because I hadn't made anything for quite a long time. I love the feeling of an idea starting to form and then you have these kind of disparate pieces that start to reveal themselves.
My favorite part is the process of sitting down and letting your imagination go where it will go.
After being away for so long due to the pandemic, what has it been like touring North America?
It's been fantastic. I feel really lucky. I mean, we haven't been here for four years. I really didn't have any expectations. I just wanted to try and make sure that I enjoy it and feel the gratitude of being able to be here.
We put a record out during the pandemic and never played it. So, playing those songs as well as the new record has been wonderful, hearing the kind of stories that people have with the music. It makes it much easier for me to connect knowing that we all went through this massive thing together.
How has music impacted your life and what do you hope your music does for others?
Well, I think, generally speaking, it's had a positive impact on my life. I'm, I'm sat here in this beautiful place surrounded by this kind of blooming nature, thousands of miles away from where I come from. And this is all because of music. The reason why I was inspired to make music was because it meant so much to me when I was growing up in terms of a lifeline in difficult periods of time. I wanted to do that for somebody else.
How are you doing today?
I'm alright man. I'm at the park right now. How you doing?
I'm doing good. I can’t really complain.
Nice. Nice.
What did your first song sound like?
My first time recording music, it was the mixtape era. I either rapped on “BMF” by Rick Ross or “Black and Yellow” by Wiz Khalifa.
What excites you the most about making music?
The most exciting part for me is that it's an opportunity to be the main character for a second. I get to really get my shit off, you know what I mean?
I really get to say what I wanna say, uncontested for however long the song is over a cool beat which makes it all the more validating.
DEEM WEARS: SUIT: MARNI, SHOES: LOUIS VUITTON, JEWELRY: MARTINE ALI
What's been your best experience performing so far?
It's hard to choose just one but, I love a big stage. There's one in Brooklyn that still holds like 1200 or something. I say, the more people, the better.I feed off the energy.
What’s the hardest beat that you’ve rapped on?
There's this song on my project We Think We Alone and it's the intro. It took me a long time to write but it's one of my most popular songs now. My guy Pip produced that and he's a classically trained musician. He had this idea for me to rap over violin since no rapper ever did classical before. We made some groundbreaking shit.
What's your favorite bar you've ever written?
This message isn’t for hope. This is gone hurt. If it don’t, then it don’t work. The definition of broke is it don’t work.
I know with this last project adultSW!M, you included more people in the process. How can you tell when creative feedback is helpful versus not helpful?
I think the only creative feedback that isn't helpful is when someone’s being selfish and offering a one sided suggestion. As an artist, I've run into creative walls and ceilings by only focusing on my opinion.
I like to listen to everybody. I think every perspective is worth considering or most perspectives are worth considering in my process. So I like to listen to my friends and team.
How do you overcome those creative walls?
I give myself a break when I clearly need one. Sometimes, I just need to step away from it and start working on something else.
One thing I find with collaboration is that the exhaustion comes a lot less frequently. I work better under pressure and that natural anxiety I feel from knowing that someone’s watching me create. So, when a collaborator is present, I tend to challenge myself more and come out with more impressive results.
ON LEFT: FULL LOOK: ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, ON RIGHT: JACKET: MARNI, TOP: ECKHAUS LATTA, PANTS: R13, SHOES: R13, JEWELRY: MARTINE ALI
You mentioned the idea of being the main character earlier. If adultSW!M was a TV show, what would the plot be?
I love that question. The plot would be a young artist going through an existential crisis while the world collapses.
Babylon is collapsing. Would that be animated or live action?
Let's say animated. Keep it fun. Also, you know, Adult Swim.
Would you voice your character?
Oh, absolutely.
Who would you want in the writer's room?
Myself, a bunch of comedians. My man Kevin Iso. I'm working on developing a TV series right now.
Like, that's my biggest goal at the moment. So I'm trying to speak it into the universe as many places as I can. I’ve been writing my ass off.
What’s your pilot about?
It's a comedy loosely based on myself and my personal journey trying to make a name for myself. There's no Jamaicans on TV and that's crazy because that seems so easy to do.
ON LEFT: TANK: TELFAR, SHORTS: TELFAR, BOOTS: R13, JEWELRY: MARTINE ALI, ON RIGHT: HAT: TALENT'S OWN, SHIRT: WILLY CHAVARRIA, PANTS: TELFAR, SHOES: TALENT'S OWN, JEWELRY: MARTINE ALI
Are you Jamaican?
Yeah, my family is from St. Elizabeth.
My family is from St. Elizabeth too. We’re probably cousins.
When I was five years old I lived out there for a year. A lot of my earliest memories are from Jamaica. I remember getting bit by a dog, being attacked by an ant hill, getting pinched by my teacher at school.
I know all these memories are kind of violent but it’s still beautiful. Everytime I’m around a certain smell and foliage, it brings me back to being five in Jamaica.
The ant hill thing is crazy, bro. I have a cousin that’s 6”6 and this man is terrified of ants to this day, he got bit by some red ants.
[Laughs] Yeah, they got me, man. But yeah, man I'm trying to tell a beautiful Jamaican American story and put that on television. I think I'm the right guy for it.
They don’t even cast Jamaicans, they’ll just put Method Man in a wig. I’m going to create that space for us and I know people will appreciate it.
Anything else that you’re working on right now?
I started a new album. I've been locked in. I'm trying to put out something soon because I'm very inspired. I don't know how soon it makes sense because adultSW!M just came out.
But yeah, I'm ready to go. I wanna keep going.
