The Motherfucker

Ed Young  The Motherfucker Barcelona 10 – 30.11.2022 Suburbia Contemporary presents three works by South African artist Ed Young, produced over the past eight years. The works interrogate, in a manner, current-day speculative thinking and physical re-positioning of real-time daily efforts at existence. Abstractly, the pieces create an arcane fly-on-the-wall glimpse at numerous versions of the age-old mantra, “How did we even get here?” – the post-bilateral dilemma of an amoeba to fish, fish to frog, frog to mammal, mammal to Dutch East Indies passage to the Great Trek to Anglo-Boer War concentration camps to apartheid oppressor to South African democracy to post-COVID/Crypto angst coupled with a minor but looming global economic recession combined with worldwide historical reckoning. Collectively, the films provide irrational and impolite interpretations as an attempt to redefine difficult spectrums of current-day thinking. Call Your Mother is a video work that stems from a wall painting project in downtown Johannesburg. The project aims to communicate a standard daily message, but one the artist could repurpose with impolite and unintentional subtexts. The work is designed as a beacon for a not-too-distant dystopian scenario predicted at the height of global decay. When most buildings have fallen, this solitary front-face brick elevation is hoped to remain.