Pavel Krisevich, a Russian performance artist from St Petersburg, and SlovoNovo, a Europe-based festival of Russian culture that gathers exiled cultural figures, were added to the Russian government’s list of “foreign agents” on 7 November.
Being added to the list, which is updated regularly by the Russian ministry of justice, leads to a raft of legal restrictions and obligations. The move is often followed by criminal prosecution and by being added to the country’s registry of “terrorists and extremists”.
“In practice, this means that participants from Russia, who were already few in number, will now be afraid,” Marat Guelman, the founder of SlovoNovo, tells The Art Newspaper from Berlin. “On the other hand, it is recognition that artists play an important role in the anti-war, anti-Kremlin movement.”
Guelman, a gallerist and dealer who left Russia for Montenegro in 2014, was named a “foreign agent” in 2021 and a “terrorist” in 2024, part of an accelerating clampdown on culture and freedom of expression following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since this time, Montenegro has been a key refuge for Russian intellectuals who have fled repression.
Guelman founded SlovoNovo, which is held annually in the ancient, walled town of Budva on the Adriatic Sea, in 2018. The festival is subtitled “Forum of Free Culture in Europe”. The curator told The Breakfast Show, a YouTube news show run by exiled Russian journalists, that it is the cultural forum’s addressing of the war, and of “Putin’s desire to fight”, which led to it being targeted.
Krisevich began staging performances in support of political prisoners in 2020, including tying himself to a cross in front of the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main successor of the Soviet KGB, in Moscow. He was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to five years in prison after firing blanks while staging a mock suicide as political protest in Red Square. His drawings depicting the brutality of prison life were displayed in Amsterdam last year.
Krisevich was released in January 2025 after serving three years and six months of his sentence. Discussing his addition to the “foreign agents” list with the independent media outlet Bumaga earlier this week, he said: “I think anyone politically prominent in any way will end up on this list sooner or later.”