Nadya Tolokonnikova | Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Spring 2025 at MOCA

MOCA’s Spring 2025 season of Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs staged at The Geffen Contemporary, now in its sixth iteration of the series doesn’t merely present performance—it proposes performance as a speculative technology, a sonic architecture for thinking otherwise in the ruins of late capitalist spectacle.

The centerpiece—and the season’s dark star—is POLICE STATE, a durational performance by Nadya Tolokonnikova (of Pussy Riot). Tolokonnikova builds a cell in which she both isolates and exposes herself. Over seven days, she oscillates between lacerating noise and spectral lullabies, crafting a sonic topography of control and refusal. The watcher and the watched become entangled in an acoustic feedback loop; the audience, once passive, becomes complicit. The brutality of the state is made intimate, rhythmic, embodied.

Curated like a slow burn rave, the programming unfolds across time like a score: each work a movement in a longer fugue meditating on surveillance, resistance, ecstatic embodiment, and the dream of collective liberation. The season, comprised of three major projects, is not content to entertain—it implicates. Sound and movement are not aesthetic flourishes here, but methodologies for dismantling and imagining. This is art as fugitive infrastructure.

And yet within the clamor of confinement, a whisper of something else emerges. Hope? Maybe. Art, certainly. Tolokonnikova renders the carceral state not only visible but vulnerable to rupture. Her cell is not just a prison, but a sanctum—a sacred glitch in the system. The performance culminates in a public conversation on prison reform with formerly incarcerated artists, followed by a live set from Pussy Riot. This is not closure, but exhale. A brief communal beat before the cycle restarts.

The rest of the WAREHOUSE season promises similarly high-stakes encounters: a techno ritual that reclaims rave as insurgent spirituality; a noise performance stretched to its physical and temporal limits; and a music festival that functions less like Coachella and more like an emergent utopia, however ephemeral. Together, they offer a new kind of musicology: one attuned to the social conditions of its making, refusing neutrality, vibrating with intent.

As Johanna Burton, MOCA’s Maurice Marciano Director, puts it, the season is “a celebration of artists’ unbreakable will to seek and create joy in unlikely spaces.” It’s a rare institutional gesture: not just recognizing art’s oppositional potential, but making space for its full, messy, insurgent embodiment.

To witness Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE this spring is to step into a fugitive frequency. It is to listen beyond the static of the now. It is to remember that even under watch, under weight, the body can still move, still scream, still sing. Because sometimes, the most radical thing you can do in a police state is to make noise.