SUPERM, A COLLABORATION AND EXHIBITION BY BRIAN KENNY AND SLAVA MOGUTIN OPENS AT BLOW DE LA BARRA JULY 10

SUPERM (Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny)
July 10 to August 10, 2007
Blow de la Barra

Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny
1974, Kemerovo/Siberia, Russia + 1982, Heidelburg, Germany
Live and work in New York

Superm is the name that dissident - journalist - porno - star - photographer - poet - video - artist Slava Mogutin and musician and multimedia artist Brian Kenny use since 2004 to collaborate in exhibitions and other art events. In the art world, Mogutin is mainly known for morose and impulsively sexy Cibachrome prints, mostly un-staged and unrehearsed, of Danish skateboarders, Dutch sneaker boys, soccer players, German skinheads, Russian military cadets, California buddy boxers, wrestlers and fetishists that we find in his honest portrayal of fixations and obsessions of youth culture and its feelings of isolation and melancholy, conformism and desire. Brian Kenny produces his own music, which combines elements of hip hop and electronic ambient; in his artwork, mainly in drawing, graffiti, photography, video and multimedia installations, he surveys queer and other identities on the edge as influenced by hip-hop culture and New York. Together they merge their raw, in-your-face aesthetics to produce layered multimedia installations combining photography, drawings, graffiti and video projection. Their best and most satisfying collaboration is Wigger, which takes its title from the slang expression originally derived from contracting “white nigger,” a term referring to a large suburban youth culture in the US and beyond, where white and mostly male youngsters imitate black urban hip-hop culture in its music, fashion, language and lifestyle. Still frequently used in a pejorative sense, the term refers to the construction of identities from parts adopted from different environments and its hybrid nature in terms of race and class. The “wigger” is said to be inauthentic, a “wannabe nigger.” Mogutin and Kenny, who both in different degrees adopt the cultural identity of the “wigger”, as Superm seek to address the complex questions of racial, sexual and cultural identity raised by this phenomenon on various levels in their work, from the questions regarding a subcultural tourism in search of the exotic, lacking what is associated with the so-called authentic background and experience, to the problematic dealing with the dissemination and perpetuation of the hip-hop phenomenon by the mass media, who seems to have constructed this “authentic experience.” In its complexity, always maintaining a youthful boundless attitude, Superm explores the processes of identity formation among adolescents and the new possibilities of emerging adulthood.
(Text by Octavio Zaya)