Artist: Nepheli Barbas, Martin Herold

Title: Water of Mars – Couples 7

Curator: Richard Bakeš
Venue: Berlinskej model, Prague

Photos: František Svatoš

The Arago tobacco bar is an abandoned and familiar place, indifferent and intimate, where one wishes to forget the seasons of Mars and the sulphurous breath of the glass doorways.

The wandering customers bathe in an atmosphere of warm and saturated reflections, like in an aquarium. One of them scratches the golden reflections of a lottery ticket hoping to win a ticket to earth. But the hearth of the fireplace seems to want to tell us something else – it is a cold fireplace and its light is a green light. In the soot and ashes, the scattered letters surviving from the flames stand up again after having lost there a foot, there a loop, there a tail. Perhaps they fly away at last, wavering, and after having loaded the sky with hard and bitter words they will fall back on us, discharged by a cloud, in a shower of black dust.

The artists

NEPHELI BARBAS, 1990, France.

She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de la Villa Arson in Nice and completed an Erasmus exchange at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

MARTIN HEROLD, 1986, Czech Republic.

His education started in 2008, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Prague, Czech Republic.