Skrepetsky, Pussy Riot, Pavlensky: Art Outside the System
Three encounters with three forms of Russian dissent: Semyon Skrepetsky outside the Giardini, Pussy Riot in front of the Russian Pavilion, Piotr Pavlensky inside an OFPRA procedure that now also concerns Europe. And yet perhaps the fracture was already there.
Link to the Italian version on Artribune
Semyon Skrepetsky Has Been Killed
The news: Semyon Skrepetsky, the name under which Robert Kuzovkov worked, Russian artist, caricaturist, dissident and refugee in Poland, was killed on June 15. But he cannot remain just another name in the international news.
We had seen him outside the Giardini of the Venice Biennale during the preview days, amid the protests against the return of the Russian Pavilion. He was there with two paintings in his hands, outside any authorized frame, in that uncertain zone where Venice, for a moment, stops being the ceremonial theatre of art and becomes pressure, control, politics.
Who Was Semyon Skrepetsky?
Skrepetsky was known for his fierce satire against Russian and post-Soviet power. His caricatures of Vladimir Putin, Ramzan Kadyrov and Alexander Lukashenko were not simply polemical images, but direct attacks on the public construction of authority. In one of his last actions, in Berlin, he showed an iconic and irreverent image of Stalin and Putin. His work struck power at the very point where power claims to be untouchable: the face, the myth, the fear surrounding the leader.
Many of us met him like that, almost in passing. With me there was only a brief exchange of words. Instinctively, I hugged him and said goodbye. At the time, it felt like a natural gesture. Today, it weighs differently.
I do not want to turn a few minutes into an intimacy that did not exist. That would be false. But that little was enough to leave a precise image: Skrepetsky did not seem like an artist seeking centrality. He had two paintings in his hands, but they did not look like a portfolio waiting to be approved. They were a statement carried physically outside the authorized perimeter.
The center was not him. The center was dissent.
Those two paintings said something simple and brutal: there is no pavilion for this Russia. There is no room for this voice. There is no frame capable of containing, without neutralizing, the Russia of exiles, opponents and artists who cannot return to their own country without risking prison, violence or persecution.
At that moment, the Russian Pavilion was not only a building inside the Giardini. It was a question: who speaks when a nation speaks? And who remains outside, holding the works in their hands?
After his killing, the question becomes even harsher: what does the West do when a Russian dissident artist is no longer only a moral argument against Putin, but a body killed inside Europe? Does it turn him into a symbol, file him away as a martyr of freedom, or recognize that dissent remains exposed, vulnerable and unresolved even after crossing our borders?
Pussy Riot and the Broken Protocol
Shortly afterward, the scene changed rhythm. With Pussy Riot, there was no longer the almost silent presence of a man outside the gates, but a collective body entering the visual field of the Biennale and breaking it open.
Pink balaclavas, raised phones, police, slogans, tension. It was not a catalogue performance. It was an interruption.
Pussy Riot were not simply protesting against Putin or against the return of the Russian Pavilion. They were asking a much more direct question: how can a major international institution legitimize the participation of a state widely regarded as criminal and allow it, inside a national pavilion, to stage its own rhetoric of power?
This is the fracture. Not Russia as culture, not Russian literature, music or art history. But Russia as a state apparatus, as an official image, as a diplomatic presence inside one of the most prestigious theatres of contemporary art.
At that moment, the Pavilion was not only an exhibition space. It was a form of recognition.
Pussy Riot’s action struck precisely there. It did not ask the Biennale to speak generically about war, repression or dissent. It asked why, while war continues and while Russian artists, opponents and exiles remain outside, a state can still enter through the noble door of national representation and occupy the space of art as if that presence were neutral.
That is where the action becomes a work. Not because everything that happens in the street is automatically art, but because in that moment the gesture forces the frame to react and, by reacting, to reveal itself.
Every institution would like to decide when dissent is acceptable and when it becomes disturbance. Pussy Riot remove that privilege.
For this reason, in Venice, their protest was not external to the Biennale. It was one of its truest images, precisely because it had not been invited.
Pavlensky, OFPRA and the Undocile Dissident
The third encounter is with Piotr Pavlensky, and it is different again. Here there is no body seen outside the Giardini, no action in front of a pavilion. There is a slower, more opaque, more bureaucratic affair, and perhaps for this very reason an even more revealing one.
Pavlensky sent me the documentation relating to the procedure opened by OFPRA, the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, which could lead to the revocation of his international protection in France.
France had granted him asylum as an artist persecuted in Russia for a radical practice based on direct conflict with power and with the repressive apparatus of the state. Now that protection is being called into question also because Pavlensky did not stop being Pavlensky once he arrived in the West.
At the center of the procedure are Lighting, the 2017 action in front of a branch of the Banque de France, and Pornopolitique, linked to the circulation of intimate videos involving Benjamin Griveaux, then a candidate for mayor of Paris.
For these episodes, Pavlensky was convicted by French courts. The point is not to erase those convictions, nor to make comfortable a practice that exists precisely in order not to be comfortable. His actions are hard, disturbing, conceived to collide with the law.
And yet, at least as emerges from the materials I have read, their center is not physical violence against other people, but the opening of a public fracture between power, image, law and responsibility.
The case stops being comfortable precisely here. If Pavlensky’s practice was recognized as radical when it struck the Russian apparatus, what happens when that same artistic grammar is exercised inside a Western democracy?
His work does not separate the gesture from the institutional response. The trial, the file, the conviction, the administrative procedure become the place where the work continues to question authority.
It is no coincidence that, together with the documents, Pavlensky also sent me two books, Subject-Object Art Theory and The Trial of an Artwork: not as simple bibliography, but as the theoretical structure of a practice that refuses to be divided into reassuring categories.
This is why his case is so uncomfortable.
Pavlensky does not correspond to the image of the ideal dissident that the West likes to protect: persecuted elsewhere, grateful here, orderly, legible, useful to the narrative of European freedom. He does not accept that protection should become domestication.
The question is another one: can a democratic state grant protection to an artist precisely because of the radical nature of his practice, and then revoke it when that same practice is exercised against Western institutions?
The Uninvited Part
Skrepetsky, Pussy Riot and Pavlensky are not the same thing, and it would be wrong to confuse them.
Skrepetsky worked with painting, satire and the caricatural image as a frontal attack on power. Pussy Riot act through the collective body, music, protest and political theatricality. Pavlensky brings art to the point where body, crime, trial, theory and state become a single machine of revelation.
But together they draw a line: in all three cases, art does not merely represent power. It forces power to expose itself.
These events, then, no longer concern only Moscow, Beijing or Tehran, nor only the places where the West usually locates repression. They concern Paris, Europe, and the limit of our idea of Western freedom when the protected artist no longer confirms our innocence, but puts it on trial.
