Skeletons smoke sigaret buds in the corner of a cell. They take a rest lying with their bones on a bunk. Or they are chased by a prison guard, also a skeleton.

The bony creatures populate the art works created by artist and political prisoner Pavel Krisevich in his cell in Butyrka, the infamous Moscow prison from the Stalin era, which housed numerous illustrious predecessors such as Mayakovsky, Mandelstam and Solzhenitsyn.

“The prison as a house of the dead - it stems from a long tradition that Dostoevsky started,”  the artist explains in a manifesto he wrote for this exhibition. “No one really lives here. To the state, you are nothing more than a skeleton in the closet, and the closet here is a prison. That applies to the prisoners and the prison guards. They too live most of their lives between the bars and the brick walls.” Russia’s prison system as an Empire of Shadows.

Pavel Krisevich is serving a 5-year prison sentence for ‘hooliganism’. His crime: he simulated a suïcide on the Red Square in front of the Kremlin by firing a disabled gun two times in the air and a third time pointed at his own head, after reading a declaration against the omnipresent political repression. He was twenty years old at the beginning of his detention.

Before his imprisonment he already drew widespread public attention with spectacular political art performances in support of political prisoners. For example, he hanged himself from the Troitsky Bridge opposite the Hermitage in St. Petersburg with a belt under his armpits and he tied himself himself like Jesus to a gigantic cross in front of the Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters in Moscow, with a burning bonfire of files of political prisoners beneath him. 

Prison bars don’t stop him from continuing his political actions. On his first day in detention he decided to make art works about life in prison and about the true nature of political repression. He uses all material at hand from his prison cell. Pieces of sheet treated with toothpaste serve as canvas for his paintings. And he uses ink, pencil and his own blood for the coloring.

“They can take away my life of freedom, but they cannot suppress my freedom to share my creativity with society, which can have impact on the system,” he states in a letter from prison.

In three years of detention Krisevich created over 1200 art works. He found ways to smuggle them out of prison. Many of his works also found their way abroad. They were sent by mail on a long journey through third countries since there is no direct mail service between Russia and EU-countries. 

“I myself am amazed that those suffocating walls with all those broken fates in between are the creative impulse for the work that has now traveled a long way to you. I would also like to mention that by looking at these works, you have your share in the support for all those prisoners who are hidden away far from the world, for the most part completely unlawfully,” he writes from his prison in a message to the visitors of this exhibition.

Krisevich has already celebrated his birthday four times behind bars. And recently he got married in the penal colony just outside St. Petersburg, where he currently is being held. The newly weds spent a three-day honeymoon in a small brick barrack just apart from the other barracks within the walls of the prison camp.

Honeymoon in prison - such is the life in unfree Russia.

by Paul Alexander