No Story has a Happy Ending, Unless You Stop Telling it Before it’s Over – 2023

The title of the project comes from a statement by Orson Welles and centers around the idea of a project in connection with the relations that are established between the perception of public and personal space, which can be translated as an inner universe. No Story has a Happy Ending, Unless You Stop Telling it Before it’s Over becomes a statement with an existential meaning, erasing the predictable border between positive and negative, creating a space for relativity and the illusion of control.

The exhibition is comprised of a visual presentation of urban realities, materialized in the shape of photographic cut-outs of the Berlin wall, insertions of smaller compositions in mixed techniques – that become starting points in creating personal narratives – and small installations made from assembling / associating ready-made objects found or acquired in Berlin. No Story has a Happy Ending, Unless You Stop Telling it Before it’s Over thus comes together as an installation intervention in an exhibition space, comprised of several parts. The photos are charged with a symbolic (social and human) meaning regarding the depicted specificity of urban reality and become a starting point in the reconstruction and interpretation of an ambivalent context, both historically and presently.

The project is a subjective depiction of contemporary man’s reality, starting from an extremely well-known urban aesthetics and reaching the idea of an individual, specific path that sometimes overlaps with a collective path. The work process within the residence and its result thus focuses on the ideas of materialization/ dematerialization and its relationship with a specific artistic context – namely Berlin as a frame of reference for creative inspiration and action.

Artistic residency / exhibition project
Artists: Ada Muntean, Mathias Bar
Fantom Gallery Berlin