Authors
Tatiana Efremova1; 1 New York University, UK Discussion
In the ten year following Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” performance and subsequent arrest there has been a lot of scholarly attention to the conception and reception of the group’s work, their political and aesthetic agenda, as well as the proceedings of the trial. Indeed, the case of Pussy Riot has exceeded the confines of a single political event and proved instrumental in understanding the political, social, and cultural climate of Russia during the last decade. One of the notions that was activated by the context of the trial and has had a lingering presence in the public domain throughout the decade is the idea of “the police state” (“полицейское государство”). This paper looks at the way Pussy Riot engages the police trope in their work before and after the trial to illuminate the relation between subject and state in contemporary Russia. First, the paper explores the roots of the trope of the policeman in anti-Soviet, dissident art by Dmitry Prigov. Second, it examines the way Pussy Riot reinvents the trope through embodiment and performance. Finally, it evaluates Pussy Riot’s attempt to instrumentalize the trope and, therefore, engage the global problem of police violence through the artistic references to BLM. 
