Art by Pussy Riot

Pussy Riot formed in Moscow in 2011 as a loose, anonymous collective of feminist performance artists, identifiable mainly by the brightly colored balaclavas that let members rotate in and out without ever confirming a fixed lineup. Their breakout moment, and the one that got two of them sent to a penal colony, was a 40-second guerrilla performance in February 2012 inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour: a "punk prayer" protesting the Orthodox Church's closeness to Vladimir Putin, cut short by security before they'd even finished. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" and served close to two years.

The group never really stopped afterward. In 2018, several masked members ran onto the pitch during the World Cup final in Moscow, dressed as police officers, in protest of political prisoners and police overreach, live, on international television, mid-match. A Russian court has since formally designated Pussy Riot an "extremist" organization, which, functionally, criminalizes continued involvement inside the country.

Tolokonnikova, now largely working and speaking from abroad, has kept building on the group's original confrontational logic in newer formats: restaging her own prison cell as an immersive installation in a Los Angeles museum, using an OnlyFans account as a deliberately provocative funding and protest tool, and remaining one of the most consistent public voices connecting the Russian art underground to opposition against the war in Ukraine.