Finally I could do my research and chose the most significant photography and portraits by Slava Mogutin a New York-based Russian artist and author, who works across different media, including photography, video, text, installation, sculpture and painting.
Born in Siberia, in the industrial city of Kemerovo, Mogutin moved to Moscow as a teenager. He soon began working as a journalist for the first independent Russian publishers, newspapers and radio stations. By the age of 21, he had gained both critical acclaim and official condemnation for his outspoken queer writings and activism. Accused of “open and deliberate contempt for generally accepted moral norms”; “malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence”; “inflaming social, national, and religious division”; “propaganda of brutal violence, psychic pathology, and sexual perversions”—he became the target of two highly publicized criminal cases, carrying a potential prison sentence of up to 7 years.
Forced to leave Russia, Mogutin was granted political asylum in the US with the support of Amnesty International and PEN American Center. Upon his arrival in New York City, he shifted his focus to visual art and became an active member of the downtown art scene. Since 1999, his photography has been exhibited internationally and featured in a wide range of publications including The New York Times, The Village Voice, i-D, Visionaire, L’Uomo Vogue and BUTT.
Mogutin is the author of two hardcover monographs of photography, Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go, and 7 books of writings published in Russian. He is the winner of the Andrei Belyi Prize for Literature (2000). His poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies in 6 languages. He has translated into Russian Allen Ginsberg‘s poetry, William S. Burroughs‘ essays and Dennis Cooper‘s fiction. He appeared as an actor in Bruce LaBruce’s agitprop porn movie Skin Flick (1999) and Laura Colella’s independent feature Stay Until Tomorrow (2004).
In 2004, together with his partner-collaborator Brian Kenny, he co-founded SUPERM, a multimedia art team responsible for site-specific gallery and museum shows in New York, Los Angeles,Moscow, Berlin, London, Oslo, Bergen, Haifa, and León, Spain.
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