Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia, the largest presentation of their work to date and the first museum show in Germany curated by a team including Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, opens today, Friday 6 September, at Haus der Kunst in Munich.
The exhibition is presented in Haus der Kunst’s LSK Galerie, housed within what was the former air raid shelter of the building, where its complex history, dating back to its opening in 1937, is particularly evident.
In the exhibition, the public are invited to take time to experience and read a personal journey entirely handwritten on walls over the period of three weeks at the bunker by Maria Alyokhina in an environment where an overload of videos and countless photographs blend in colours, humour, punk, and noise.
Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia emerged from passionate exchanges with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who first encountered Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot in Moscow and has been planned by Haus der Kunst since the beginning of 2023.
Maria Alyokhina said: “Riot is always a thing of beauty. At school, I had this dream of becoming an artist and I practiced graffiti on my school notepad. If you start your schoolwork on the first page and do your sketches in the back, sooner or later the two will meet in the middle. AND, NEXT TO YOUR HISTORY NOTES, GRAFFITI APPEARS which turns history into a different story”.
Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia follows the solo exhibitions of African American artist Tony Cokes (2022), and the Australian Indigenous film collective Karrabing (2023) at Haus der Kunst, featuring overlooked histories through the lens of new and inventive visual languages.
The exhibition is curated by Ragnar Kjartansson, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir and Dorothee Maria Kirch (Kling & Bang, Reykjavik); Lydia Antoniou, Andrea Lissoni, Margarita (Haus der Kunst, Munich) and organised and toured by Maria Alyokhina and Kling & Bang, Reykjavik.
Haus der Kunst is grateful to its sponsors: Freistaat Bayern, Gesellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst e.V., Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung und der Ulli und Uwe Kai-Stiftung.
xxx
Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia
6 September 2024 – 2 February 2025
Haus der Kunst | LSK Galerie
Prinzregentenstraße, 1, 80538 Munich, Germany