In this episode, our host Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar is joined by Miramar Al-Nayyar, the Iraqi artist whose UK solo debut opens today (July 3, 2026) at Saatchi Yates in London. Miramar is the inaugural winner of the Saatchi Yates Fellowship Prize, selected from more than 5,000 submissions worldwide. She is 29, based between Amman and Abu Dhabi, and paints with a maturity that shows in her command of atmosphere, silence, and inner force.

Her exhibition brings together paintings shaped by the vastness of the Middle Eastern desert: rock formations, flowers, solitude, and the slow intelligence of nature. Made between Lebanon and Jordan against a backdrop of conflict and unrest, these are not abstract landscapes. They are meditations on endurance, on what can still bloom under pressure.

At the centre of the exhibition is the desert rose: a formation at once geological and floral, mineral and symbolic. In Miramar's hands it becomes visionary, a flower of the mind that emerges from silence, heat, distance, and memory. Her surfaces hold that tension between barrenness and abundance, fragility and force, the physical world and the invisible one. The work draws from desert landscapes and natural movement, but also from meditation, seclusion, and the ornamental rhythms of classical Islamic geometry. The paintings unfold like inner architectures: psychedelic, atmospheric, embodied. Her process is intuitive and physical, gesture as a way of listening. She paints less to depict nature than to receive it.

What stayed with me was the spiritual depth of our conversation. We spoke about art as a form of surrender, about solitude as a creative condition, about the desert as both real landscape and inner state, about how images arrive from somewhere beyond language.

Something in the way Miramar speaks about nature, intuition, prayer, and the unseen resonated with me. It reminded me that painting, at its most powerful, is not only visual. It can be a vessel for transformation, a way of making contact with what is buried, what is sacred, and what is still becoming. We speak about the desert rose, movement, memory, meditation, conflict, hope, and what it means for a young Iraqi artist to bring this personal, spiritually charged visual language into her first UK solo show.

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I'm speaking today with Lea Bischofberger, a Zurich-based gallerist and art dealer whose life and work are bound up with one of the most remarkable legacies in postwar and contemporary art.

The Bischofberger name runs through some of the defining artistic relationships of the late twentieth century. Her father, Bruno (who passed away in late spring 2026), was a legendary gallerist who worked with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Tinguely, as well as Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, George Condo, Miquel Barceló, Enzo Cucchi, Peter Halley and Mike Bidlo.

But Lea's story isn't only one of inheritance. It is also one of proximity, intuition, independence and renewal. Having grown up close to the artists, collections and conversations that helped shape art history, she now carries that experience into her own gallery work in Zurich.

Through Lea Bischofberger Gallery and Lele Projects, she has shown artists including Kate Daudy, Geraldina Bassani Antivari, Ashkan Sahihi, Roberto Ruspoli, Aryana Sheibani and Ulf Saupe. The programme suggests a more intimate and exploratory chapter, one attentive to memory, materiality, portraiture, language and psychological presence.

In this conversation we talk about legacy, taste, the changing role of the art dealer, Zurich as an art-world city, and what it means to carry history forward without being defined by it.

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Today, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar is joined by Nadya Tolokonnikova — conceptual artist, musician, activist, wanted criminal, and one of the founders of Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist protest-art collective formed in Moscow in 2011.

Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years in a Russian prison after Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance Punk Prayer inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour — an action that transformed a brief act of punk dissent into one of the defining works of political performance art of the 21st century. Since then, her work has continued to confront the spaces where power presents itself as untouchable: the church, the state, the prison system, the museum, the media image.

That history matters in Venice. A national pavilion at the Biennale is never just architecture. It is a state speaking through culture.

Last week, in May 2026, as Russia returned to the Venice Biennale for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Pussy Riot and FEMEN staged two connected protests. On May 6, they confronted the Russian Pavilion itself, using Ukrainian flags, pink balaclavas, smoke, flares, punk music, and slogans against Russia’s war. The action forced the pavilion to close temporarily.

On May 7, the confrontation moved from the pavilion to the institution that had allowed Russia back in. At Ca’ Giustinian, the headquarters of the Biennale Foundation, Tolokonnikova and the protesters challenged the Biennale’s leadership and its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, over the claim that culture can remain neutral while being used by the Russian state. Reuters reported that the demonstration continued from the previous day’s action at the Russian Pavilion and was redirected by police to the Biennale Foundation’s headquarters, where flares in the colours of Ukraine were ignited.

This continuity — from the cathedral in Moscow to the pavilion in Venice, and from the pavilion to the Biennale’s own leadership — sits at the centre of our conversation.

Tolokonnikova’s recent work has only sharpened this confrontation between art, punishment, and political theatre. Her 2023 performance and exhibition Putin’s Ashes, later shown at institutions and galleries including Dallas Contemporary, turned the image of Putin into ritual material and helped place her back on Russia’s wanted list. In 2025, POLICE STATE premiered at MOCA in Los Angeles as a durational performance and installation built around the architecture of confinement, before travelling to MCA Chicago later that year.

Her accolades include Time Woman of the Year, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the LennonOno Grant for Peace, the Woody Guthrie Prize, and an Honorary Doctorate from RISD. She also carries, as a kind of involuntary badge of honour, the Russian Federation’s 2025 designation of Pussy Riot as an extremist organisation — a reminder that, in authoritarian systems, art is not treated as metaphor when it threatens power. Reuters also reported that Pussy Riot was declared an extremist organisation and banned in Russia in 2025.

So this episode is about protest as art, culture as power, exile, propaganda, and the impossibility of neutrality when neutrality itself becomes a political position.

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