Moscow’s Red Square Gallery has permanently closed its doors just weeks after an exhibition about gay and transgender teenagers was shut down by police. Maria Dudko, the founder of the non-profit space, says she was forced to close after she lost a job she took at a digital company to subsidise her work for the gallery, although she was not fired because of the exhibition.
“I closed the gallery for a mixture of reasons: because there is no funding for culture, because of my unstable employment position and because propaganda in Russia has been stepped up—you can’t use certain words without attracting attention,” Dudko says, noting that the term LGBT was in the title of the show.
Be yourself: stories of LGBT teenagers, an exhibition of photographs of Russian youths, was cancelled before it was due to open on 14 June following pressure from Moscow police. Dudko says officers came to the gallery twice before the show was installed and threatened to erect a roadblock on the opening night. A version of the project was then installed outdoors on Gogolevsky Boulevard for one day, but this was also shut down by police.
According to reports in the Russian media, police claimed to be enforcing laws that prohibit the distribution of information about homosexuality to people under 18. Dudko says the admission policy for the show was strictly adults only. The Moscow police could not be contacted for this story.
