Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia

Riot is always a thing of beauty.

At school, I had this dream of becoming an artist,
and I practised graffiti on my school notepad.

If you start your schoolwork on the first page and do your sketches in the back,
sooner or later the two will meet in the middle.

AND, NEXT TO YOUR HISTORY NOTES, GRAFFITI APPEARS
which turns history into a different story.
—Maria Alyokhina

What is resistance in art, and which stories need fundamental part of exhibition making nowadays? Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia at Haus der Kunst is the largest presentation of the artistic collective’s work to date and the first museum exhibition in Germany devoted to Pussy Riot. For over a decade, the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot has been fighting against oppression. They have challenged and stretched the conventions of performance, music, and video to shed light on the injustice that the Russian state has imposed on its citizens with political imprisonments, violence, and censorship.

We believe that art changes both the world at large and individual countries.
It’s the only way to ask uncomfortable questions that doesn’t involve instant answers or patterns of thinking, like politics.
Art reflects our reality, and that’s why it has such power.

The exhibition is presented in the LSK-Galerie, nestled within the air raid shelter of Haus der Kunst, the site where the challenging past of the building, opened in 1937, is more perceivable. Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia follows the solo exhibitions of African American artist Tony Cokes (2022) and the Indigenous Karrabing Film Collective (2023) based in Australia, featuring overlooked histories through the lens of new languages. As both previous surveys in the former bunker, Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia aims at pushing the boundaries of exhibition making towards a dense experience that is a fundamental chapter in recent history and a presentation of a groundbreaking practice that reinvents media languages.

We like it when people think—and react not at the level of comments, like “ah, how funny,” but when they start to analyse.

Unfortunately, this is rarely done.
Although any movement, including us, can be analysed in terms of its influences and how it can affect the cultural situation.

There is a lack of such analytical texts;
it doesn’t matter if they are positive or negative, but critical.

The exhibition focuses on Pussy Riot’s artistic protests in Russia, collected and presented by Pussy Riot founding member Maria Alyokhina. It features the group’s non-violent actions as well as the reactions of the increasingly authoritarian regime and inevitably provides an insight into the evolution of Putin’s Russia over the past ten years, leading up to the war against Ukraine. It serves as a deeply personal testimony, unlike the extensive documentation of Pussy Riot’s actions available online or the abundant global media coverage applauding their bold artistic acts.

Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia at Haus der Kunst emerged from passionate exchanges with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who first encountered Maria Alyokhina in Moscow. Kjartansson, who was personally involved in providing a safe passage to Maria Alyokhina following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, co-curated the original Reykjavik exhibition with Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir and Dorothée Maria Kirch at the independent art space Kling & Bang in Reykjavik.

Art is a realm that helps us fight forces which try to mechanise people;
forces which see humans as things that need user instructions
and should be placed on the shelf of a store in a shopping mall.

The exhibition invites to take time and to experience and read a personal journey entirely handwritten on walls by Maria Alyokhina, in an environment where an overload of videos and countless photographs blend in colours, humour, punk, and noise.

We use the principle of bad art, bad rhyme and bad music.
The idea was as simple as a tank:
Everyone has to have an access to music and we talk about it constantly.
Anyone can be Pussy Riot.

Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia is organised and toured by Maria Alyokhina and Kling & Bang, Reykjavik.
The exhibition is curated by Ragnar Kjartansson, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir and Dorothee Maria Kirch, Kling & Bang Reykjavik; Andrea Lissoni, Lydia Antoniou, Margarita, Haus der Kunst München.