USED from the late Middle Ages until the early 19th century, a ducking stool was an instrument of public punishment for women judged to have stepped out of line. Tied to the chair, the woman was paraded around the streets before being dunked in the nearest river or pond. Widely used across Britain, Europe and the English-speaking colonies of North America, the practice’s primary purpose was to humiliate and censure women identified as troublesome and argumentative.

A modern take on the ducking stool features in Free The Pussy, which will come to Summerhall in Edinburgh next month. It is an exhibition of artwork made in response to the imprisonment of members of punk collective Pussy Riot by the Russian government in 2012.

The ducking stool was made by Tamsyn Challenger, a Scotland-based artist who also curated the exhibition. The first time these works have been presented together, Free The Pussy includes pieces by artist-musicians Yoko Ono, Billy Childish, No Bra and Miss Pokeno aka Alannah Currie, formerly one third of 1980s pop band the Thompson Twins. There is also work by Jamie Reid, the man behind the Sex Pistols’s most famous record covers; official Gulf War artist John Keane; and pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago, recently named as one of Time Magazine’s most influential people.

Challenger says she made her ducking chair because “nothing resonated more in terms of how women are continuously ‘ducked’, silenced and gaslighted”, even today.

“Perhaps the correct word is ‘gaslit’,” Challenger tells The National, referring to the manipulation technique whereby an individual’s credibility is questioned through persistent denial, discrediting and misdirection. Donald Trump appears to be a master.

As a metaphor for the treatment of Pussy Riot, it’s on the money. In February 2012, members of the group staged an unauthorised performance inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Wearing colourful clothes and balaclavas, the women jumped around the altar for less than a minute before being removed. Later that year, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, and each was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

An appeal saw Samutsevich released on probation but the sentences of the other two were upheld. The women’s 40-second performance had, the judge said, “crudely undermined the social order”. Having been publicly identified, the women were threatened with rape and burning.

The exhibition will coincide with 10 performances of Riot Days, a part-gig, part-theatrical documentary show led by Alyokhina which is based on her account of the incident, her arrest and subsequent imprisonment.

Challenger says the outfit, whom she refers to as simply “the Riot”, are a symbol of freedom to her.

She says: “[They stand for] freedom of thought, freedom of equality, women’s freedom and creative freedom in spite of being imprisoned for a 40-second pop-up performance.”

Free The Pussy brings together work which featured in Let’s Start A Pussy Riot, a book commissioned in 2012 by the Rough Trade record label, and other work produced in response to the band’s call for artist across the world to support them.

Although there were curatorial aspects to Challenger’s previous show 400 Women, a 200-artist collaborative work created in response to the rape and murder of thousands of women in the Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez, Free The Pussy is the first time the artist has had complete free rein to chose the work presented in an exhibition.

“It’s obviously been the stuff of dreams to be working with Yoko Ono,” Challenger says. “What has really delighted me, though, is having autonomy with the curation. As an artist, you get licensed to do other things, and it’s been fun. I like to have fun running alongside the politics.”

Though remaining tight-lipped on some of the surprises she has in store, she reveals how Summerhall’s Mar Memorial Gallery has been transformed into a blood red “Womb Room Cinema” screening films and videos.

In response to the case Maedeh Hojabri, a young Iranian woman arrested after she posted a video online showing herself dancing, Challenger is making a “dancing corridor” in the venue.

“People like the Riot, like Malala, like the women in Iran, what they do in putting their heads above the parapet, in speaking out, is very brave,” she says. “I don’t think things have improved for women since 2012, in Russia or anywhere.”

Challenger refers to Susan Faludi’s Backlash, the 1991 writer’s look at how the freedoms American women had won in 1970s and 1980s could not be taken for granted. The rise of the hard-line right and the reactive nature of social media, Challenger says, presents a similar situation today.

“We’re still there in a lot of ways,” Challenger says. “With the Weinstein thing, there was an immediate backlash, an immediate countering. Women who had been silent for years found the courage to speak, but the strength of the backlash against them was huge.”

She adds: “Women still have their noses pressed up against the pane of glass for the most part. A stone has been thrown on to a car windscreen but there’s no crackage.”

Free The Pussy: Aug 1 to Sep 26, Summerhall, Edinburgh. Tel: 0131 560 1580.

Pussy Riot: Riot Days: Aug 10-19, Summerhall, 7pm, £17.50. Tickets: bit.ly/RiotSummerhall www.summerhall.co.uk www.tamsynchallenger.com