It’s not easy to get in touch with Maria Alyokhina. A PR person sends her a message on Telegram, the encrypted messaging app favoured by anyone who’s worried about surveillance. She’s half an hour late when she appears, crouched on a chair, dressed all in black, vape in hand. 

“I don’t use a calendar,” she says apologetically. “It’s evening, but I’m kind of a late-night person. I do a lot of things in the night.”

Alyokhina, better known as Masha, has a wild energy to her. As part of Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist art collective that used brazen punk displays to critique Vladimir Putin’s oppressive government, she’s had an intense decade. 

Since breaking into global public consciousness with an anti-Putin “Punk Prayer” performed in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, Pussy Riot’s high-profile activism has been varied and eye-catching. It has encompassed everything from protests and punk songs, to flying Pride flags at government buildings, to burning the constitution over a web stream, to agitating for opposition to the invasion of Ukraine. 

Members have also found themselves becoming unofficial spokespeople for Russian resistance, trying to persuade politicians around the world to take a harder stance against Putin’s government.

“Even after two years of full-scale war, I see the same mistakes, which is basically the West not taking this danger seriously,” Alyokhina explains. “A lot of countries continue to buy Russian resources, like Russian gas and oil, purely sponsoring this regime … Last time in 2014, when they annexed Crimea, when they started this nightmare in the eastern part of Ukraine, nobody cared. Now, it’s repeating, and the next time will be even more horrible than what we saw in 2022.”

But back to 2012. Alyokhina was one of three people imprisoned after the “Punk Prayer”, ostensibly for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” While the action was designed to be attention-grabbing, nobody thought they would be punished. The arrests signified the beginning of civil-liberty erosion in Russia. 

“We didn’t expect even a criminal case…[and] after us, they started to open the big criminal cases and imprison people constantly,” she recalls. High-profile artists and politicians had sometimes been imprisoned, but “we were the first usual people who had been imprisoned for our gesture, for our opposition.” 

Even after being released in late 2013, she was subsequently subject to a carousel of government surveillance, house arrest, and jail for years. 

That finally led her to flee the country in 2022, breaking out of house arrest by disguising herself as a food delivery worker. The costume was left to her by fellow activist—and her girlfriend—Lucy Shtein, who’d used the same method to escape her own house arrest. 

Alyokhina has since found a safe haven in Reykjavik, where artists Ragnar Kjartansson and Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir persuaded her that Pussy Riot’s activism deserved to be archived. 

“I should say a huge thanks to Ragnar and Ingibjörg, who actually told me in a lot of words that we should do this, and it’s important, and people should see it,” she says. “They proved to me that a lot of people just don’t even know that we did all this—because that was spread on the internet, and some things weren’t even on the English-speaking internet.”

So began Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia, with a name drawn from a bishop’s critique of that famous “Punk Prayer”. Since opening at Kling & Bang in Reykjavik in 2022, it’s travelled to Louisiana, Denmark, and Montreal, with the next stop being North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery as part of Capture Photography Festival. 

The exhibition looks different in every location, with an in-depth timeline of Pussy Riot’s activism pasted across the walls. Huge photographs are surrounded with hand-lettered explanations, mixed with graffiti-style art and impactful films. Images and video were sourced from countless Pussy Riot members. The mixed-media, organized chaos reeks of punk spirit, as chunky text and haphazard arrows and bright colours provide a chronology of Pussy Riot’s actions, the state’s reactions, and the political context behind it all.     

“I’m always adding something, because each time I look at it, I just start to remember that I also have this and this, and this probably should be explained more properly,” Alyokhina enthuses. “I’ve tried to make [additions] super short and clear and understandable, and yeah—it’s kind of growing.”

Along with the museum exhibit, five Pussy Riot members are joining the curators Kjartansson and Sigurjónsdóttir for a conversation on March 21; and Riot Days, a performance art concert based on Alyokhina’s 2017 memoir of the same name, is taking over The Pearl on March 22.  

It’s all come a long way from the young women wearing colourful tights over their heads in the streets, protesting Putin’s policies with in-your-face feminist performance art.

“When I first heard that our actions could be shown in the museum, you just cannot imagine my face—I was super skeptical,” Alyokhina reflects. “But to have it all together in one place actually makes something exist. When it’s all together, it’s a separate thing—and it actually works. The first time I saw Icelandic people crying in the gallery, I just understood that I watch it with my eyes—and they watch it with a completely different perspective.

She continues: “It was probably a bit naive to think that people are all following the situation [in Russia]. Until the nightmare comes to their doors, they don’t care. So someone should show them.”

Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia 

When: March 22 to June 2

Where: Polygon Gallery (101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver)

Admission: By donation; RSVP to the opening event on March 21 here