Putin's Ashes (2023)

Putin’s Ashes (2023 | 3'04") transforms political rage into a ritual of symbolic destruction. The film documents a performance initiated by Pussy Riot in August 2022, in which twelve women—mostly Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian—gather in the desert to burn a monumental portrait of Vladimir Putin. Wearing balaclavas, they perform rituals around the burning image, driving knives into the earth and casting spells intended to expel Putin from power.

The work turns the destruction of a political image into an act of collective fantasy and resistance. Putin’s carefully cultivated mythology of masculine strength and invulnerability is replaced by an image of a body that can be burned, reduced to ashes, and symbolically defeated. The ashes themselves were collected and preserved by Nadya Tolokonnikova, later becoming physical objects within an installation. Through music, ritual, feminist imagery, and magical thinking, Putin’s Ashes proposes imagination not as an escape from political reality, but as a weapon against the apparent permanence of authoritarian power.

Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest-art collective founded in Moscow. Putin’s Ashes was directed, edited, styled, and scored by founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, whose practice combines performance, music, visual art, and political activism in opposition to authoritarianism and patriarchal power.

FILM BLOCK 4
Continuous screening - see www.gogbot.nl/timetable for the schedule