Nikita Teryoshin Burns His Passport and Documents Pussy Riot in Venice

A Russian passport, held against a grey Berlin sky, set on fire and photographed: that single image by Nikita Teryoshin has become the emblem of a career spent exposing the backstage of power. It has also made his return to Russia impossible. "Before the full-scale invasion, burning a passport would have landed you with a fine," the photographer says. "But they've changed the law, and applied it retrospectively, so it's now 16 years in prison."

Teryoshin took the photograph in early 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A German news magazine had commissioned him to document Ukrainian refugees crossing the Polish border; a hand injury forced him to withdraw. Long estranged from his country of birth, he minted the passport image as an NFT, sold posters and limited editions, and donated thousands of euros to causes in Ukraine. The photograph ran in the German broadsheet Die Zeit and circulated widely online. "It was super supportive," he says of the NFT community of Ukrainian and Russian artists around him. "Photographers from all over the world, helping each other out."

The reaction from Russia was less generous. Some Russians mocked the burning as cowardly, enacted from the safety of a third country. An old classmate posted on social media that she had reported the image to the security services and that he would be taken directly from the plane to a prison cell if he returned. Teryoshin is sanguine. "From the beginning, it was pretty clear that I can't go back," he says.

How did Venice come about?

Born in Leningrad, Teryoshin moved to Dortmund as a teenager. His father worked as a set designer and painter for theatre and television, and those workshops taught him how arrangements of objects, bodies and lighting construct meaning. His projects have since examined the global arms trade, political conventions, and the artwashing and sportswashing practised by repressive regimes.

After opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in a Siberian penal colony in February 2024, Teryoshin photographed a Pussy Riot protest at Berlin's Russian embassy and sent the group his pictures. Two years later — after a disorienting assignment shooting the petrostate of Qatar's inaugural Art Basel fair — a message arrived from Pussy Riot's founding member, Nadya Tolokonnikova. The group would protest outside the Russian Pavilion during the preview week of the Venice Biennale. They wanted him to document it. It felt, he says, like "a greeting from the universe".

What does the protest change?

Pussy Riot, formed in 2011, brief photographers in advance of their actions. Their brightly coloured balaclavas anonymise members and echo other feminist and liberation movements. The Venice action also involved Femen, founded in Ukraine, whose activists use their naked bodies and painted slogans as media — a strategy criticised as hegemonically white, thin and able-bodied, and as imposing a Western view of emancipation.

On the pavilion steps, Tolokonnikova told the press: "Russia wages hybrid war. It's not just tanks and drones, murders and rapes in Ukraine, but it's also culture, art, language, so called 'soft power'... And you guys just open the doors to them. That's funny."

Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, asked about states accused of crimes against humanity, responded: "If the Biennale started selecting works [on the basis of] passports, it would cease to be what it has always been: the place where the world comes together." Teryoshin rejects the framing. "One of the best examples of artwashing is this pavilion," he says.

The pavilion was open only during preview week, with few members of the public present. "There were maybe 200 people there at that moment," Teryoshin reflects. "But the only thing the world will see are the pictures." His book Game of Chairs is published by pupupublishing, priced €55.