The Duo Show No Story Has a Happy Ending, Unless You Stop Telling It Before It’s Over, presented by Fantom Gallery in Berlin, is the result of an artistic residency in which the artists Ada Muntean and Mathias Bar participated in August.

The title of the project comes from a statement by Orson Welles. It centers around the idea of a project in connection with the relations 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 more minor 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 comprising 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 reconstructing and interpreting an ambivalent context, both historically and presently.

The project is a subjective depiction of contemporary man’s reality, starting from a highly 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 – Berlin as a frame of reference for creative inspiration and action.