Ragnar Kjartansson
Maria Alyokhina, member of Pussy Riot, on opening night of the exhibition “Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia” at Kling & Bang gallery on Nov. 24 in Reykjavik, Iceland. (Heida Helgadottir for The Washington Post)
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — For more than a decade, Pussy Riot — a feminist, anti-Putin art collective — has been staging brilliant, disruptive and often poetic political stunts. These “actions,” as the group calls them, have been part of its ongoing attempt to expose the absurdity and cruelty endemic in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
For their efforts, Pussy Riot members have been subjected to government harassment, surveillance, beatings, detention, forced labor and now exile. They have also been championed by pop stars, including Madonna, and defended by human rights groups such as Amnesty International. They have been the subjects of documentaries, books and segments on “60 Minutes” and have graced the cover of Time magazine. All the while, as Pussy Riot’s fame has grown, its urgent warnings about Putin have come to seem increasingly prescient.
“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia” is the first overview of what Pussy Riot has been up to the past 10 years. Improvised, anarchic and viscerally intense, the exhibition — at Kling & Bang, an artist-run gallery on the Reykjavik waterfront — may just be the most important of 2022.
The first work you encounter as you enter the show is a short, sensationally provocative video. Filmed only days before the opening in the studio of Ragnar Kjartansson, Iceland’s most famous contemporary artist, the video shows Pussy Riot member Taso Pletner, in a red balaclava, standing on a table over a propped-up portrait of Putin. Pletner hikes up their black smock and proceeds to urinate on the portrait, before kicking it to the ground.
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