Nadya Tolokonnikova and Joey Orr

Experience a conversation with the founder of Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and MCA Chicago’s Deputy Director and Chief of Curatorial Affairs, Joey Orr, in advance of the opening of the Midwest premiere of her performance installation POLICE STATE. Together they discuss Tolokonnikova’s upcoming MCA project as well as her extended political and performance practice, which confronts authoritarianism with an uncompromising force in streets, on stages, and within museums around the world.

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.

Joey Orr is the Deputy Director and Chief of Curatorial Affairs at the MCA, where he previously served as the Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow. Recent writing has been published in edited and peer-reviewed publications, including his book, A Sourcebook of Performance Labor with Routledge Press. He has served in various editorial roles for many publications, including as an associate editor for the Journal for Artistic Research and currently as a contributing editor for Art Papers magazine. He holds an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from Emory University.