Free the Pussy! Discover the new Pussy Riot exhibition storming Edinburgh
Image: Pussy Riot by Jamie Reid
Image: Putin Is a Dickhead by Wendy Saunders
Image: Let Our Sisters Go by Layla Sailor
Image: Fear Not by John Keane
Image: Free the Pussy by Billy Chyldish
19 July 2018
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Katie Marie Davies
A new exhibition celebrating Russian protest group Pussy Riot is set to open in Edinburgh next month.
Free the Pussy! will spotlight art created in response to the group’s imprisonment back in 2012, including work by Billy Chyldish, John Keane, No Bra and Yoko Ono.
Curator and artist Tamsyn Challenger became involved in Pussy Riot’s “call to arms” just months after the group staged their controversial Punk Prayer in a Moscow cathedral, earning two years’ jail time for activists Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina.
Challenger was one of hundreds of artists submitting protest art to Let’s Start a Pussy Riot, a book of art sold to raise money for the group’s defense. “I thought the protest work being made should be seen as a physical exhibition,” she told It’s Nice That magazine.
Pussy Riot themselves will also be appearing in the exhibition at Edinburgh’s Summerhall, putting on their own show, Riot Days. Merging punk, electronica, theatre, documentary footage and protest, the show will run in the Scottish capital between 10-19 August.
Free The Pussy! will run from 1 August to 26 September at Summerhall, Edinburgh. For more information, click here.
