How Pussy Riot Is Challenging Russia's Return To The Venice Biennale

As the Venice Biennale prepares to welcome Russia back into its pavilion, Pussy Riot is trying to redirect attention elsewhere: toward artists in prison. The collective is backing“Resistance Imprisoned,” an exhibition at Ritsche-Fisch Galerie in Strasbourg that opened on April 19 and runs through May 31, the same period as the Biennale's opening.

The show gathers work by nearly 30 artists still imprisoned in Russia, along with three former prisoners and Alexander Dotsenko, a jewelry artist who died in jail. The project was assembled by Art Action, the organization founded by Nadya Tolokonnikova and John Caldwell to support artists at risk. Tolokonnikova said the works were made under severe constraints, sometimes on envelopes, on bedding covered in toothpaste, or with blood used as an improvised medium.

Among the artists represented is Anastasia Dyudyaeva, an art teacher serving a 3.5-year sentence for distributing postcards critical of Vladimir Putin in support of Ukraine. Jan Katelevsky received a 9.5-year sentence for journalistic work on police corruption in Moscow. Lyudmila Razumova was arrested in 2022 for anti-war graffiti and is serving seven years. Pavel Krisevich, a performance artist who spent nearly four years in prison, is now living in exile after painting with ink and blood on prison bed sheets.

Tolokonnikova said the project grew out of her own imprisonment in a penal colony from 2012 to 2013, after her arrest for“hooliganism” over Pussy Riot's“punk prayer” protest against Putin at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior.“When I was there, I dreamed that my voice would not be silenced,” she said.“For all of these prisoners we pay attention to them and we don't forget them. This is a sacred duty.”

The official Russian pavilion exhibition this year is“The Tree is Rooted in the Sky,” a group show of more than 50 young musicians, poets, and philosophers from Russia and other countries. The pavilion, a familiar presence in Venice's Giardini, sat empty during the 2022 Biennale and was later lent to Bolivia in 2024.

The return has not gone uncontested. Since 2019, the pavilion's commissioner has been Anastasia Karneeva, formerly head of Christie's Moscow and the daughter of Nikolay Volobuyev, the current deputy chief executive of Rostec, the Russian state-owned defense contractor. On April 10, the E.U. Commission's Education and Culture Executive Agency warned Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco that the institution could lose a €2 million grant for the 62nd Biennale in 2028 if corrective action is not taken by May 11.

Against that backdrop,“Resistance Imprisoned” reads less like a parallel exhibition than a direct rebuttal - one that frames the Russian pavilion not as a neutral cultural return, but as a test of what international art institutions are willing to overlook.

MENAFN21042026005694012507ID1111014031