The first fall exhibition at Zaazrak is an opportunity for a meeting: the usual collective opening festivities are this time accompanied by an artistic meeting – the exhibition Stories Read in the Palms of the Thorn Orchard Keepers brought together Brussels-based Gaspard Emma Hers and Prague-based Šenay Kobak.

The initial point of Šenay Kobak’s work is the life itself. Whether it is the rides on freights, the joy experienced in relationships and the sadness of leaving them, the fascination with the freeparty phenomenon, or the glimpses of happiness and freedom found even in mundane situations, Šenay Kobak experiences and processes everything with a strong romanticism and liberating lightness. However abstract the final form of her works may appear, each of them hides a particular story or references to lived situations and are thus always to some extent the artist’s visual diary. Words and fragments of sentences inscribed in some of the paintings and the titles of the works can serve as clues.

The works of Gaspard Emma Hers also have a strong romantic touch, but in this case, rather than to the beauties and horrors of everyday life, they turn inwards: into a world of visions, rampant fantasy, dreams and nightmares. Their images are permeated by strange creatures – ghosts and demons – whose ghoulish form evokes nearly forgotten memories of the names of old Czech haunts such as prtioko, běs, meluzína, hejkal or plivník. These squabbling creatures inhabit various historicizing chambers, gothic cellars, crypts or dungeons, which they guard and where they haunt. The folds of their arches are not dissimilar to those in the space of Zaazrak|Dornych, whose inhabitants and guardians these characters temporarily become.

The shapes and lines in the scratched palms of the imaginary keepers of the thorny orchards in the title of the exhibition thus symbolize not only the manuscripts of the two exhibiting artists, but also connect them to the very space in which they met: a dungeon in the area of Brno with the mysterious name of Dornych, derived from the German dorn, i.e. thorn, an area literally entitled thorny.

— Šimon Kadlcák