Suburbia Contemporary

Based in Barcelona, Spain, Suburbia Contemporary presents points of radical similarity between different material cultures and artistic traditions from across the globe. Born in 2017 in Granada with the imperative of gathering artists from a variety of cultural backgrounds and geographical locations within a single cluster, the gallery launched Satellite spaces in Cape Town (2019) and Florence (2020), structuring contact between the East, West, North and South through a consistently evolving, critically engaged exhibition program open to antique and traditional knowledge systems, secret, hidden languages and future definitions of craft and artistic practice.

Represented artists:

Jake Aikman, Han Bing, Nombuso Dowelani, Mar Hernández, Robert Pettena, Jacob van Schalkwyk, Sheghao Mi, Cat Spiman.

Solastalgia – from the Latin, solacium, and the Greek root -algia – expresses an ‘emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change’. Paul Bogard subtitles his book, Solastalgia, ‘An Anthology of emotion in a disappearing world’. A kind of homesickness, the emotion speaks to loss, but also to retention – what is held, what survives – and, as such, need not be understood negatively, or pathologically.

It is in this more optimistic mode and mood that one should consider Mar Hernandez’s interventions in photographs through drawing. Titled Universale, Hernandez instinctively crosses boundaries, compelling us to consider the psychic, physical, and emotional impact of destruction, especially the destruction of what we consider ‘home’. In Hernandez’s case, what matters is brick and mortar, and the rubric within that generates a personalized space and place – a chair, a table, portraits, a bowl, the stretch of a floor and its human imprint, the silence that clings in a fallout, some loss, be it private, political...

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