The Genesis of Pussy Riot and The Guerrilla Girls

Photography of Nadya Tolokonnikova by Paola Kudacki
Photography of Käthe Kollwitz of Guerrilla Girls by Rebekah Campbell
Interview by Horacio Silva

Nadya Tolokonnikova is tired of people butchering her name. “They mean well,” offers Nadya, a co-founder of Russian feminist protest-art collective Pussy Riot, before issuing a gentle rebuke to this writer for mangling the pronunciation of her surname, “but they always mess it up like this, so I’m changing my last name to Riot. Seriously.” Noted.

If Nadya, who gained global notoriety and was sentenced to two years in prison following Punk Prayer (an anti-Vladimir Putin performance piece Na- dya and her balaclava-wearing conspirators staged inside a Moscow cathe- dral) is a little guarded, it’s hard to blame her. Weeks before we catch up for a round-table discussion with Käthe Kollwitz of Guerrilla Girls, Nadya – who was declared a ‘foreign agent’ by Russia in 2021 – was placed on the list of Russia’s ‘Most Wanted Criminal Suspects’ by Putin, the tyrant whom she has fought for more than a decade to shame and oust.

It’s why she prefers not to reveal her location and asks that we not post videos of our conversation, lest someone deduce her whereabouts from the meta data. Once she starts talking to Käthe and Frida, in a free-ranging conversation about art and politics that at times resembles a mutual-admi- ration society, she relaxes into the affable and considered personality who has charmed and shocked audiences in equal measure.

For their part, the anonymous organisation of female activist-artists in gorilla masks known as Guerrilla Girls has been a formidable art force since first

hijacking the culture in the mid-1980s with attention-grabbing interventions that amuse, provoke and inform.

In a world exclusive, A-M Journal brought together the three masked aveng- ers to discuss everything from the role of artist as activist to the sexism and bigotry that continues to drive the art establishment and world at large.

A-M Journal: I was watching tennis on TV earlier – bear with me – and climate-change protesters interrupted this important match. What is usually a routine rejection from the stadium took more than an hour because the protestors had affixed their feet to the concrete. Now, I love tennis, but I also love climate-change protests. If you don’t want protests broadcast around the world, then don’t align yourself with fossil-fuel sponsors. Regardless, it reminded me that culture-jamming is alive and well. In case you Guerrilla Girls thought that you were retiring anytime soon, I’m afraid to tell you that we need you.

Käthe Kollwitz: We totally agree and can’t stop doing this work. Nadya, you can’t either, and we’re better for it.

Frida Kahlo: I’d like to say how happy I am to meet you. I admire your cour- age, your stamina and all that you do.

Nadya Tolokonnikova: Thank you. That means the world to me, I am so thrilled to meet you both.

A-M Journal: I figured you’d be fans of one another. Nadya, growing up in Siberia, and then in Moscow, were you aware of the Guerrilla Girls?

Tolokonnikova: Not when I was a teenager. I had limited access to the internet and, in bookshops in Siberia, we didn’t have books like this [holding up Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly]. That was the reason I moved to Moscow, to get access to the greater knowledge of humanity. But I definitely became aware of them, and there would not be Pussy Riot without Guerrilla Girls.

When we were forming Pussy Riot, we wanted to have a lecture on radical feminism in Russia. We were researching punk feminism and couldn’t find anything, so we decided to come up with a fake collective [to save face during the lecture]. We looked at punk feminism in other countries and thought a perfect example was Guerrilla Girls (and Bikini Kill also). We de- cided to make our version of Guerrilla Girls because it was such a wonderful name (strong and weak). Pussy Riot, at least to my mind, kind of repeats from what Guerrilla Girls did, in terms of using language as a creative weap- on. We owe everything to Guerrilla Girls.

Kahlo: That is very flattering, and we feel equally grateful for Pussy Riot. What you do is so audacious, dangerous. That’s something we don’t really have to worry about. What we have in common is trying to find new ways to get people’s attention and change their minds about this disgusting system we live in.

A-M: Although you started from very different places, you have used very similar creative weapons in that crusade – humour, provocation, informa- tion. And both groups have experienced shifting agendas as the goalposts for resistance have moved. Guerrilla Girls started very much with a focus on the art establishment, but the parameters have expanded considerably, right?

Kahlo: Yes. We were just pissed off and trying to figure out a way to get people to listen to us. We called ourselves Guerrilla Girls because of the as- sociation with freedom fighters, and the word girl seemed to offend people for some reason. We adopted the gorilla masks because it just confounded everything.

It worked. We got attention right away, but we didn’t have the same global platform that you had at Pussy Riot. You burst on the scene and took such incredible risks. I wonder if we would have had the courage to take those risks and if we would have endured as you did.

Tolokonnikova: I hope that you never have to find out. Honestly, that’s the reason why we fight for a better, more equal, and just society. We hope people don’t have to go through what we did. But human beings are more resilient than we think. Knowing what I do about you, your stance, and your stamina for being able to do this for so many years, I’m sure you would do just fine.

A-M: With your gorilla masks and ski masks, you both rely in no small part on the aesthetics of anonymity. Although, in Nadya and her cohort’s case, the masks are very much out of necessity, out of fear...

Tolokonnikova: Not really, it came from a similar place as the Guerrilla Girls.

A-M: How so?

Tolokonnikova: The political police knew us anyway. We had been on their agenda for about four years before starting Pussy Riot, in 2011. They had us on every possible blacklist – they track your phones, they follow you and occasionally practice ‘preventive’ arrests when you leave the house, because they can. I don’t know if you have seen the movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline, but just as [the oil protesters in the film] go through a bunch of hoops so the cops can’t listen to them, we used to throw away our phones, take out our SIM cards, all that stuff.

But we put on balaclavas because of Guerrilla Girls and freedom fighters who covered their faces, and because we wanted to represent an idea or ideas and not the personalities behind those masks. We even switched our names all the time for that reason. We thought we were protecting ourselves from internal conflicts, but it wasn’t always successful.

A-M: Being masked has allowed both groups the freedom to change and welcome new members. Käthe and Frida, how big is Guerrilla Girls now?

And how many women would you estimate have gone through the ranks over the years?

Kollwitz: We’ve had more than 60 members from all kinds of backgrounds. The secret of the Guerrilla Girls is that we’ve always been a small group, because there’s no way you can do the kind of work we do – trying to come up with a game-changing action, or even a poster – in a giant organisation.

Kahlo: Doing collective work is tough. When it works, it’s wonderful. And when it doesn’t work, it’s unbelievably painful. Everything that could have happened in a relationship—you can imagine the conflicts when you’re married to 60 people for 38 years—has gone down. I think one of the rea- sons that we were able to persevere is that we had this kind of pledge of anonymity, and no one could profit from the work. It kept things inside the group. In the beginning it was also to protect ourselves because we were all aspiring artists. Then we realised the art world didn’t want us and that we had to ridicule the system that we felt was oppressing us.

Kollwitz: It’s not like we had a plan, but every project got us thinking about another. Sometimes we would go out in the streets in the morning and hang out around our posters that we had put up the night before, and we’d listen to what people were saying. It would give us ideas for the next one. We kept our ears open and realised that the situation was changing year to year. And we just had to keep thinking about how we can make our critique a little bit more insightful and our targets a little broader until it really became the entire capitalist system.

Kahlo: We started out asking questions. And one question led to another, and we’re still questioning, but we were always protected by the masks. From the beginning, a lot of people thought they knew who we were, but they were usually wrong. Like Pussy Riot, we realised that the anonymity was a tool for speaking about specific issues rather than focusing on per- sonalities.

A-M: Do you feel like you are stuck with the masks now?

Kahlo: On the one hand, people don’t want to know who we are anymore. I don’t think anyone really cares. But I’m sure the minute we take these masks off, the world will be less interested in us because then we become individuals.

Kollwitz: I’m not sure about that. I mean, the other part of what we do is twisting issues around, and people are attached to that. We get feedback confirming that the way we present facts and do crazy things has a huge effect on everybody. I’m not saying the masks are nothing, but I think it’s not the entire picture. That’s true for you too, Nadya, because it’s the actual work that is so unforgettable and changes people immediately.

A-M: Anonymity aside, bringing facts to the table on important issues has been central to your mission. The Guerrilla Girls project has been statis- tic-and fact heavy. How much harder does your work become when facts are under attack?

Kahlo: A lot harder. Facts are still facts but it’s the beliefs about truths that are presented as fallacious. But we fell into a formula where we would make an outrageous statement to get people’s attention and then sort of clobber them with statistics and facts. The number of women artists who are shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art can’t be contested. It is what it is. Wheth- er someone believes that’s fair or not, well, that’s another issue.

Kollwitz: There’s a lot of fantastic political art, but there’s also things that just go, this is bad, this is terrible. And I think our idea was to do something different, like the poster that Frida was just talking about, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met Museum? We could have done a poster with a headline that just said that there aren’t enough women artists in the Metropolitan Museum, and we would not be talking today. As artists we come up with new in-your-face ways, backed up with information that has the power to change people’s minds.

A-M: It doesn’t surprise me, given that you co-opted the language of magazine headlines in your work, that you became such media darlings and have been profiled in them ad nauseam.

Kahlo: We always wanted to change people’s minds and realised that if you can present something to someone who disagrees with you and stop them in their tracks and challenge their thinking, and even make them laugh, then you’ve got their attention, you’re inside their head for a minute and have an opportunity to change their mind. It’s an effective strategy.

A-M: Nadya, you have been getting a bit of media attention for recent forays into the art institutions, including a project with [American feminist artist] Judy Chicago at the New Museum in New York. How did these projects come about?

Tolokonnikova: I think the war in Ukraine broke something in me and I feel like I have to use every possible venue or vehicle to stop it because I am still hoping for a good outcome, and the end of Putin. I have to oppose and stop him.

A-M: How has your exposure to the industrial art complex been?

Tolokonnikova: A lot of them are scared. I was surprised. On the surface at least the dominant rhetoric in the West is that museums and galleries support activists who fight for diversity and go against totalitarian regimes, but when it comes to actions it’s not always the case. I’m not going to name names, but the amount of hard no’s I got from people is astonishing. Even though five minutes earlier they had been telling me how brave I am and how inspired they are, and asking what they can do for me. I’d say, well, let’s show [the film] Putin’s Ashes, and suddenly their schedules were full for the next year or more.

Kahlo: Unfortunately, the art world is filled with oligarchs who are art collec- tors, and the powers that be don’t want to insult them.

Kollwitz: It relies on ‘geniuses’ so that they can sell blockbuster paintings for millions of dollars to make billionaires richer. Kahlo: It’s sad that it sort of comes from the top down, rather than the bot- tom up, and that American and global museums are run by the wealthiest people in the world. I mean, it’s a throwback to the time of kings and queens and kaisers and czars.

A-M: Nadya, I saw that TED Talk where you talked about courage being contagious. It doesn’t sound like it’s the case in the art world.

Tolokonnikova: Courage is indeed contagious, but someone like Damien Hirst is not going to be infected by your courage. Maybe, who knows, but most likely it is going to be people just like you, activist groups working on the ground, but their voices are often not heard often, and that’s what we’re trying to change.

Kollwitz: The system sucks, as we’ve all been saying. Things have gotten better in the art world the last several years because there are people who care about it and are trying to push things forward. And because there are people like you, like us, who push the envelope and make them care.

Tolokonnikova: While still working with those people who are open to our ways of living in the traditional art world, obviously, we’re trying to build alternative institutions that have mutual support and where the energy is bottom-up.

Kahlo: A problem with the top-down model, with, say, philanthropy in the United States, is that people are willing to give money to do things as long as nothing changes. They don’t want a different system. And that’s really a problem, but as Käthe says, there are also great people in museums. They often approach us to do some kind of dirty work for them, which is great fun.

A-M: How do you all feel about the attack on other traditionally safe third spaces like libraries?

Kollwitz: That’s a big question, man. We’re at a time right now where there’s so much pushback by the right-wingers to not have any actual history or culture, any acknowledgement of the people who actually live on this Earth, what they believe in and what they do and who they love. It’s a huge issue. This is going to continue and we all have to fight it.

A-M: Nadya, you have been adept at turning to new technologies and ap- proaches to organise people and move money around for your projects. Recently you introduced the code Ukraine DAO [decentralised autonomous organisation] project and raised an incredible amount of money [selling NFTs, mostly of the Ukrainian flag]. Can you talk to me a little bit about your harnessing of those technologies and platforms to keep generating these genre experiments that you do?

Tolokonnikova: It’s just my personality. I like new things and learning new tools. I believe that activists, especially art activists, should be looking into new technologies, not necessarily to embrace it, but to learn about it and to formulate an informed opinion about it. And so that these technologies are not weaponised against us.

I always give the example of how I’m not a fan of Bolsheviks or Lenin be- cause they destroyed what I loved in Russia – culture, philosophy, art – but they were effective at capturing vital infrastructure. They captured post of- fices, telegraphs and bridges. What are the bridges, post offices and tele- graphs today? It’s the internet, digital tools of distribution and dissemination of information, and currency and value. While I am definitely not a specialist in it, I’ve decided to dive in and see how I can use it for my activist work. And we raised $7 million for Ukraine in just two days.

We’ve also started a Unicorn DAO that specifically supports women artists and LGBTQ+ artists in the digital art space, because, as we all know, they’re heavily underrepresented in the traditional art world. I thought, maybe be- cause this digital art space is still so small, we can really make a big change with raising capital and deploying it in collecting artworks made by vulnerable groups of people.

A-M: You also started a Pussy Riot Only Fans account – were you active as a sex worker? Talk to me about that.

Tolokonnikova: I started it after interviewing Stoya, who is an adult perform- er who wrote a book [Philosophy, Pussycats and Porn] I read. In it, she writes about the challenges of being a sex worker and how people praise and put you on a pedestal but only as a trashcan. I was mesmerised. It really shifted my perspective.

I thought I was sex positive, but I was also on the fence when it came to sex work and thought that all people who do it were forced to do so. And while there are situations where that is the case, I have met people who genuine- ly enjoy their sex work. I became friends with a bunch of strippers and some of them joined Pussy Riot. Starting my Only Fans was an organic way of me developing a more positive approach to sex work.

A-M: What happens on the site?

Tolokonnikova: I have the persona of a dominatrix. Our conversations are pretty sexual sometimes, but I’ve been amazed at the quality of my crowd. For the most part they’re gentle and respectful of boundaries, and they ask me for permission to do certain things. And if people are unnecessarily rude, I try to shift the dynamics and explain to them why they shouldn’t be. I feel like they can take this knowledge with them and apply it to the rest of their lives. I use this dominatrix persona to show men, women and non-bi- nary people, all sorts of people, how putting women in power can be not just useful for everyone but also really joyful and pleasurable.

A-M: Sexual politics aside, is it a politically inflected account? Do you also diss Putin?

Tolokonnikova: Only when I’m really pissed off. There are some people who log on to talk about politics and I do talk to them to an extent, and then I’m just like, you know, ‘You should go to our Patreon’. This place is more about my sexual pleasure.

A-M: What about you, Guerrilla Girls, what do you have cooking?

Kahlo: We’re going to work on a graphic novel about our experiences, and you know, hopefully young people might take away a few lessons from us. We just did a project for the Women Reframe American Landscape exhibi- tion at the Thomas Cole Foundation, which is about Hudson River School paintings. We ask the question: Why did these paintings look like white people were the first people in that landscape when that land was stolen? And why did the painters present this landscape as a perfect place, when in fact, the same people who bought those paintings were fucking up the land- scape with iron works and cutting down all the trees and leaving a mess?

There is a kind of sad, cruel idealism to a lot of art, but we really want to make people realise how complicated it is. Also, the behaviour of male artists is shocking. I mean, why are the richest male artists total sexists in their private lives? What is it in our culture that rewards them, starting with Picasso and Rembrandt, and that behaviour?

Kollwitz: We’ve been doing all these works about the abortion issue in the United States, and everyone’s rights and lives being taken away. And we’ve done some stuff about prisons in the US, democracy in Korea, even a proj- ect in Tasmania where the surrounding oceans are warming at two to three times the normal rate. We’re always doing things all over the world, either going to speak in places or have shows, but a lot of times we are pushing back against whatever institution we were invited to be part of.

Kahlo: We often get hired to make trouble. And you know, that’s kind of fun, because we make trouble and leave, and then they clean up the mess. Of course, they can say, ‘Oh, it was the Guerrilla Girls’ fault’, and take whatev- er they can from it to try to make institutional changes.

A-M: Mind that you’re not run out of town and tarred and feathered!

Kahlo: Nah, we’re good. It’s fun to be a professional complainer.

A-M: I’m being serious. I know that Nadya has been attacked in the past, but have the Guerrilla Girls ever been physically assaulted or threatened at one of your interventions or performances?

Kollwitz: We’ve definitely been threatened. A group of guys came to some gig we were doing in Texas not long ago and looked like they were going to do something, but they never actually did anything. When we do stuff on the streets we get some angry, nasty people come up, but there are also a lot of people who are glad to see what we’re doing.

Kahlo: I had an armed guard when I spoke at Florida State University a couple of years ago. They just felt that I needed it. There were some far right-wing speakers at the University the week before and made a big to-do. It’s chilling to try to make jokes when there’s a guy offstage with his hand on a gun, but those are the times that we live in. If anything, it means that as artists we’re being taken seriously.