Nadya Tolokonnikova is many things. Dissident and pop star, conceptual artist and punk. But above all, she is one thing: an iconoclast who creates icons of her own. A contradiction.

That contradiction sits at the center of her exhibition here in Cologne. What does it actually mean? Let’s start with one side of it: iconoclasm. In Tolokonnikova’s art, the term is to be taken literally. It targets icons—those of the Orthodox Church, and those of Russian state ideology: the cult of Putin.

Back in 2012, Tolokonnikova and Pussy Riot staged one of their “Punk Prayer” performances inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the greatest shrine of Russian Orthodoxy, itself deeply subservient to the Kremlin. A desecration of symbols of authority, one might say, that led to Tolokonnikova’s exile and her nearly two-year imprisonment in a penal labor camp in Mordovia. In 2023, already living in exile, came PUTIN’S ASHES, a video performance in which she and a group of masked women burned a…