Inside Nadya Tolokonnikova’s POLICE STATE: A Performance of Confinement, Resistance, and Radical Imagination at MCA Chicago
Photo Credit: Yulia Shur, courtesy of MOCA.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) unveils POLICE STATE, the Midwest premiere of Nadya Tolokonnikova’s newest performance installation. An uncompromising, visceral encounter with authoritarianism and the human will to create under pressure. Best known as a founding member of Pussy Riot, Tolokonnikova has spent more than a decade turning political resistance into art. With POLICE STATE, she transforms the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater into something far more claustrophobic: a cell that is part stage, part sanctuary, and part surveillance machine.
“POLICE STATE is a call to find light in the darkest places and to resist through creation.” —Nadya Tolokonnikova
Reconstructing Confinement
The installation echoes her own history. In 2012, after Pussy Riot’s now-canonical Punk Prayer, Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years in a Russian penal colony on fabricated charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” The conditions she endured included forced labor, isolation, and unrelenting monitoring, which really formed the foundation of this work.
Inside the MCA, she reenters that space, stitching garments for hours each day just as she did in prison. Her voice and breath shape an immersive soundscape that slips between lullaby and abrasion, inviting visitors into a world where creativity becomes a survival tactic.
Walking into the theater, you are presented with the option to sit and observe or walk down and immerse yourself into this world of servalenace.
The cell is deliberately oppressive. Its walls are lined with reproductions of artworks created by currently and formerly incarcerated political prisoners across Russia, Belarus, and the United States, a reminder that the forces POLICE STATE critiques stretch far beyond Tolokonnikova’s own story.
A guard tower rises nearby. Video feeds display both live footage of the artist and archival images from Russian prisons. A neon emblem modeled after a Russian Orthodox cross glows red over the scene, both sacred and accusatory. Suspended above are works from Tolokonnikova’s Icon series, made from bedsheets produced in American and Belarusian prison industries—banners of quiet resistance.
The Audience as Participant
The installation’s power doesn’t come only from the environment; it comes from the viewer’s role within it. Through peepholes arranged around the space, audiences watch Tolokonnikova work. They navigate architecture designed to make them complicit.
Tolokonnikova cites Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, emphasizing that the installation is not merely observed it's enacted through the audience’s choices. Watching becomes participating; surveillance becomes shared.
From an outside perspective, walking around looking through the peepholes almost felt wrong. Once you realize there was a prisoner inside, there's a level of question that comes into play. Should I be watching this person? Do they want me watching? Can I talk to this person? Does this person even know I'm here? How long have they been here?
“The audience becomes part of the panoptic machine.”
Power and Its Inversion
For Tolokonnikova, the symmetry between the powerful and the condemned is essential. She recalls being transported to prison after her sentencing, surrounded by a police motorcade.
This mirroring of subject and oppressor underscores the installation’s themes. In POLICE STATE, creation becomes defiance, and confinement becomes a site of radical imagining.
The installation calls on viewers to examine their relationship to power, surveillance, and the illusion of safety. It is both a warning and a declaration that creativity can be a weapon and a lifeline.
POLICE STATE will be on display at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) through the end of the month.
About the Artist
Nadya Tolokonnikova is a conceptual performance artist, activist, and the creator of Pussy Riot, a global feminist art movement. In 2012, she received a two-year prison term following the anti-Putin performance Punk Prayer, which The Guardian later named among the best artworks of the 21st century. In 2023, Tolokonnikova’s installation, Putin’s Ashes, at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, propelled her into a new criminal case and put her on Russia’s most wanted criminal list. Her debut museum exhibition, RAGE (2024), was presented at OK Linz, Austria, and the eponymous performance at Neue Nationalgalerie, Germany. Tolokonnikova’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Museum of Art and Design, New York; and the American Folk Art Museum, New York among others. With thanks to Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin.
