No

In 2014, a team of independent journalists left Russia to escape censorship. In exile, they created Meduza. The decade that followed has been marked by frustration and turmoil: war in Europe, the pandemic, the climate crisis, escalating violence in the Middle East, a global rightward shift, burgeoning support for dictatorships, and the rise of cynicism in politics. Over the past 10 years, people have been confronted with major historical events — such catastrophic encounters always generate tragic stories.

The title of the project is radical on purpose. No, «Нет» in Russian is a symbol of resilience. To say No, to have the ability to object, is a basic human right, one that is now being denied to so many people, including in Russia. The word No can get you arrested or imprisoned. It can get you murdered. This exhibition brings together the voices that keep saying No against all odds. It pays homage to journalists, civic and political activists, and to all those who have the courage to disagree.

Drawing on an analysis of news headlines, the curatorial team selected several themes that shaped the last decade and asked artists to reflect on them. Hall by hall, the exhibition reveals these concepts.

The exhibition space is designed as separate rooms, bearing the names of the major themes, connected by an interweaving artistic and documentary narrative.

Dictatorship. Artist Stine Marie Jacobsen and writer Teobaldo Lagos Preller’s new work “Quantum No” invites visitors to make use of their freedom of speech to write political statements as part of the long-term “Law Shifters” project that the duo began collaborating on in Chile in 2022. The project was created by Jacobsen in 2015 as a way for people to engage in participatory democracy and has since traveled to many different countries, from Greenland to Ukraine and Lebanon. Taking on the role of the narrator, Svetlana Reiter, an ex-Meduza investigative journalist, sheds light on how the cultural and intellectual elite become the backbone of an autocracy.

Resilience. In his new commission for the exhibition, Fernando Sanchez Castillo has erected a monument that cannot be built in contemporary Russia — a statue of Alexey Navalny, who was murdered in prison in 2024. The iconic image of the politician making a heart shape with his hands is turned into a figurine — pocket-size statues that visitors can take home with them in exchange for leaving a note on resilience. A narrator named Alex, who is Meduza’s Chief Technical Officer (his full name remains undisclosed for security reasons), discusses the practical side of resilience — he’s the mastermind behind the anti-blocking tools that allow Meduza’s newsroom to reach people in Russia, and helps the outlet survive constant cyberattacks.

Censorship. The Danish art collective SUPERFLEX explores the power of accumulated data and its impact on humankind. The mural “Данные народу” (“All Data To The People”) is in Russian and blatantly painted over, drawing attention to the current state-sponsored silencing of the media and self-censorship. In the same room, Galina Timchenko, Meduza’s publisher, describes her life-long odyssey of fighting censorship as a media manager.

Exile. Artist Alisa Yoffe has painted the long lines at the French migration offices where she waited to apply for refugee status, observing the crisis while being an émigrée herself. Film critic Anton Dolin, who was brutally driven out of Russia due to threats to him and his family, shares his experience of abandoning a settled day-to-day life and starting anew in exile.

War. Three journalists — Elena Kostyuchenko, Taisia Bekbulatova and Lilia Yapparova — tell their stories from the Russia-Ukraine war as female reporters on the frontlines. Since Russian men of any age and profession were banned from entering Ukraine after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, in Russian-language media the war has been predominantly reported on through the eyes of women.

Artist Pilvi Takala’s new commission is a video based on her experience attending the “National Defense Course” — an invite-only training that the Finnish military has been organising since the 1960s. The coveted course aims to rally support for national defense and foster preparedness in case of crisis or war. By observing how the course is designed to influence its participants, Takala examines the militarization of Finnish society and the social dynamics associated with it.

Sergei Prokofiev shows works from his “Hell” project. With a 3D pen, Prokofiev reproduces the carcass of the Donetsk International Airport (named after the famous composer who is the artist’s full namesake) and the Mariupol Drama Theater. Both structures suffered heavily during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: The Donetsk airport was destroyed in 2014, and the Mariupol theater in 2022. The architectural artworks are accompanied by a recent graphic series made with the ashes of deliberately burned plastic structures.

Cristina Lucas’s ongoing project “Tufting” is an embroidered map of aerial bombings committed all over the world — this grim map has recently been extended to include the atrocities caused by Russian bombs during the war in Ukraine.

Another artist displayed in the same room, who has chosen to stay anonymous due to security reasons, launched the “Time of War” project in 2022, which currently includes 150 iterations of the phrase “I want the war to end” written in Russian, English, Ukrainian, German, French and other languages. Serving as an act of self-healing as well as a manifesto for peace, the project will continue during the show, inviting visitors to participate.

Fear. Gülsün Karamustafa’s work “Where Continents Meet” is from 1997, but nevertheless directly relates to the current time of crisis and touches on the fear every parent has for their child. The work uses child-sized military uniforms, which the artist found in a store in Istanbul, as a powerful symbol for the useless sacrifice that wars demand, forcing mothers to feed the massacres with their own children. Ivan Kolpakov, Meduza’s editor-in-chief, talks about the fear that permeates the lives of people doing journalism in exile — the fear for colleagues on the ground, for family members remaining in the country, and for the future.

Polarization. Ukrainian writer Zhenia Berezhna, who has been under pressure due to her decision to continue writing in the Russian language, reflects on polarization through the prism of language — her main work instrument. The artist Semyon Khanin, in his new installation, makes the viewer quite literally see black as white and white as black, a visual demonstration of how polarization creates a funnel that sucks us in and makes us vulnerable to manipulation.

Loneliness. Alexander Gronsky, a photographer who intentionally stayed in Russia after 2022 to document the country during one of its most painful moments, reflects on loneliness, describing his role as being “the last one in the shop.” In this room, Gronsky is both the artist and the narrator. Along with his video interview, a captivating and meditative slideshow presents his works — images of Russia shot over the last three years, showing how television screens have pierced through the landscape, with streets and buildings that are recognizable yet different, imbued with propaganda, sadness and fear.

In the same room, the artist Pavel Otdelnov presents his recent project “Primer,” inspired by an old Soviet alphabet book he had as a child. Large canvases portray pages with the letters of the alphabet illustrated by morbid scenes — R stands for “radiation,” and G for “grave”. Pavel’s new series is a reflection by someone left alone with his fears.

Hope. It is the coda to the entire project. A series of paintings by Aleksey Dubinsky shows people queuing at the Borisovskoye cemetery in Moscow during Alexey Navalny’s funeral, an event that went down in history as “the burial of hope.” Both meanings of the phrase are present here: Some people think that his death shatters any hope for positive change in Russia in the near future; others, on the contrary, consider the tremendous lines of mourners to be a brave act of resilience in a country where you can be jailed for any act of protest.

The ambiguity of this statement is crucial to the whole story told by this exhibition. Despite its name, the last room, Hope, does not provide anything sweet or comforting — it’s an open ending. In the video for that last theme, Meduza’s team members answer a simple question: why do they keep doing what they do?