Daria Serenko (born 1993) is a Russian poet, curator and public artist. A feminist and LGBTQ activist, she has received death threats from the far-right and been imprisoned for 'extremism'.
Life
Daria Serenko was born in Khabarovsk in 1993, and studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. She lives in Moscow, where she works as a curator at the Municipal Library in Moscow.[1]
In Serenko took part in the 2015-16 anti-militarist travelling art exhibition Ne Mir (No Peace). In her collaborative 2016 project Tikhii Picket (Silent Picket), participants create an A3 political poster and record reactions. Serenko herself permanently travelled with her Silent Picket poster, "three months under the supervsion of a poster" and as a result "constantly communicating with people, fifteen or twenty hours a day". In 2016 Serenko also curated a Moscow exhibition of Stuckist art.[1]
In 2020 Serenko was one of the cofounders of Femdacha, a feminist retreat on the outskirts of Moscow.[2]
On Valentine's Day 2021 Serenko organized a 'chain of solidarity' for female victims of political repression. After announcing the event on Facebook, she received an estimated 600 death threats.[3] That year she worked for the campaign of human rights activist Alyona Popova, a candidate for the State Duma. In November 2021 she published a Facebook post underlining that migrants were only responsible for 3-4% of crimes in Russia. Soon afterwards, she discovered that her phone number and a home address had been leaked to far-right activists. The founder of the Male State movement urged his followers to "crush" the "scum",[4] and she received thousands more death threats.[5]
On 8 February 2022 Serenko was sentenced by Moscow's Tverskoy District Court to 15 days in jail for a September 2021 Instagram post advocating tactical voting. The post contained campaign symbols for the Smart Voting campaign of Alexei Navalny's' Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), proscribed in June 2021 as an 'extremist organisation'.[6][7]
Works
Poetry
- Siberia Burns: A Poem from Russia. Los Angeles Review of Books, 12 August 2001. Translated by Rachel Brazier, Serena Clapp-Clark, Paige MacKinnon, Helen Poe and Elizabeth Tolley.
- Contributor to Galina Rymbu et al. eds., F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry. isolarii, 2020
References
- ^ a b Andrei Erofeev; Irina Kochergina (2017). "Voices From the art scene: interviews with Russian artists". In Lena Jonson; Andrei Erofeev (eds.). Russia - Art Resistance and the Conservative-Authoritarian Zeitgeist. Routledge.
- ^ Isabelle Khurshudyan (14 March 2021). "The feminist retreat in the woods of Russia, away from Putin's power". The Independent. Retrieved 27 February 2022.
- ^ "Russian Activists Face Death Threats Over Women's 'Solidarity Chain' Protest". The Moscow Times. 16 February 2021. Retrieved 27 February 2022.
- ^ Vladimir Kheifets (10 November 2021). "«Тебя убьют» — националисты угрожают феминистке расправой" ["You will be killed" – nationalists threaten feminist with reprisal]. Plus One (in Russian). Retrieved 27 February 2022.
- ^ Samantha Berkhead (25 December 2021). "For Russian Women, 2021 Was a Year of Broken Promises". The Moscow Times. Retrieved 27 February 2022.
- ^ Sophia Kishkovsky (9 February 2022). "Pussy Riot's Masha Alekhina arrested for second time in two months over social media posts". The Art Newspaper. Retrieved 27 February 2022.
- ^ "Russia: Poet sentenced to 15 days of administrative detention over Instagram post". Freemuse. February 2022. Retrieved 27 February 2022.