Pussy Riot and FEMEN’s Venice Biennale protest showed the version of Ukraine the EU knows how to consume: obedient and stripped for export
Yellow and blue smoke rose, and out of it appeared a pair of breasts with “RUSSIA KILLS” written across bare skin. The performance was optimized for the press preview circuit, providing free self-pleasuring material for the Ukrainian-flags-in-bio crowd and their patriarchy-fighting-for-easy-body-access comrades alike.
The Venice Biennale! A handful of balaclava-wearing half-naked performance artists from Pussy Riot and FEMEN barricaded the Russian pavilion for all of 30 minutes to protest against its opening in support of Ukraine. Nadya Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot’s greatest hits machine, grumbled that she had to sneak in under an assumed name because the organizers wouldn’t book her table. Mission accomplished: the world’s most pretentious artsy crowd got another virtue-signal photo op – cheeky dose of solitary-viewing fuel for the right hand included. It would be best described as museum-grade thirst. A brief deliberate detour into bedroom-Pulitzer territory.
Watching organizations that claim to fight the patriarchy deploy the patriarchy’s oldest currency is quite ironic. Their weaponry doesn’t consist of arguments, intellectualism or difficult work of political thought: they offer up bodies for display, courting the male gaze they claim to loathe. Whether there is a slogan written across naked breasts or not, the ask is the same as it always has been: look at me, look at my flesh. The patriarchy, being neither stupid nor ungrateful, obliges.
Here is what makes this specifically funny, if you have the stomach for it. FEMEN was founded in 2008 after its founder became aware of Ukrainian women being duped into going abroad and sexually exploited. Its original slogan was “Ukraine is not a brothel.” It protested sex tourism, trafficking, and prostitution – the industries that were consuming Ukrainian women’s bodies for foreign money. That was the mission. Fast forward to Venice 2026, and we’re observing the same movement stripping for the cameras of foreign journalists at a European art fair, making sure the lighting is good, giving the gentlemen of the international press something to look at.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: rt.com
