nagel draxler gallery

BerlinCologneMunichPaintingPhotographySculpture

Dec. 18

www.nagel-draxler.de
Weydingerstraße 2/4
10178 Berlin

Nadya Tolokonnikova

Nadya Tolokonnikova was born in Norilsk, Siberia, in 1989. As an artist, activist, and founder of the feminist collective Pussy Riot, she has been challenging authoritarianism through radical artistic expression for over a decade. Politically persecuted for her conceptual performances, she gained international notoriety in 2012 with her "punk prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral. This protest led to her imprisonment in a Russian penal camp.

Since then, she has consistently used art as a weapon against oppression—in the form of performance art, installations, objects, and music. Tolokonnikova has developed a visual language that rebels against conservative realities: anarchic, radical, and at the same time deeply moving.

Exhibitions artistic development

2024: OK Linz dedicated the world's first solo museum exhibition to her.
2025: She presented her first solo exhibition, "WANTED," at the Nagel Draxler Gallery in Berlin.

Tolokonnikova creates her own icons in her paintings. She blends Old Slavic calligraphy, contemporary slogans, and crosses with the stylized face of a woman wearing the characteristic Pussy Riot mask. In this way, she constructs a new visual language of resistance in which religious iconography merges with revolutionary urgency and protest becomes both sacred and personal. She also reinterprets "riot shields," classic instruments of state control, as artifacts of resistance in order to question the power structure between authority and protest. Tolokonnikova thus transforms symbols of resistance into art objects.

Political dimension and "Putin's Ashes"

In August 2022 , Nadya Tolokonnikova staged the performance "Putin's Ashes." Together with twelve other women from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, she burned a massive, three-by-three-meter portrait of Vladimir Putin in a desert landscape. Dressed in black silk negligees, torn fishnet stockings, and red balaclavas, the participants performed ritualized incantations as they set the image on fire. The ashes were collected in small glass vials and later exhibited as relics.

The performance and accompanying installation attracted worldwide attention. As a result, Tolokonnikova was declared the most wanted criminal by the Russian government in September 2023; her name has been on Russia's international wanted list since February 2025.