or Nothing Remains but Air
Several soap bubbles are released simultaneously. It remains uncertain whether one, several, or none of them is an offering.
The bubbles disappear. Nothing remains to confirm what, if anything, was offered, or whether it was received.
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Sörnyepuszta & Cserfekvési, Hungary / Spitzelofen, Austria / Valcamonica, Italy
site-specific action, performance
The work was presented as documentation.
It continues through viewing, circulation, and memory.
Traces in perception
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Documentation on view
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Online traces: Instagram
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Self-residency in Istanbul
2025
Locations: Beyoğlu, Sultanahmet, Kadıköy, Galata Bridge
Medium / Format: Site-specific action, photography, ephemeral gesture
The Golden Apple of Istanbul is a site-specific project unfolding through photography and a performative gesture. It explores how symbols travel through cities, histories, and bodies, and how meaning shifts when an object moves from being held to being released.
A real apple, coated in gold paint, appears across historical and everyday locations in Istanbul. Photographed against the textures of the city (streets, bridges, water, architecture), it becomes both an object and a mirror, reflecting ideas of power, desire, value, and transience.
Photographic exploration
The first stage consists of a series of photographs made across different parts of the city. The golden apple is carried, held, placed, and framed within Istanbul’s layered urban landscape.
Neither staged nor theatrical, these images register quiet encounters between the object and the city, moments of pause, attention, and subtle displacement.
The apple functions here as a wandering symbol. Once associated with conquest, imperial ambition, and ultimate reward, it is reintroduced into everyday space as fragile, temporary, and exposed to weather, touch, and time.
Performative gesture
The photographic sequence culminates in a simple action. From the Galata Bridge, the golden apple is released into the Golden Horn.
This gesture transforms the apple from an image into an event. No longer possessed or displayed, it becomes an offering to the water, to the city, to history itself. Floating briefly among fishermen, boats, and passing gulls, the apple drifts without destination.
The act was carried out privately, without announcement, during a period of heightened artistic activity in the city, remaining outside any official framework. Passersby became incidental witnesses rather than an audience, encountering the action without explanation.
Conceptual context
Historically, Istanbul has been described as the “Golden Apple of the World”, a metaphor for power, desire, and the ultimate prize of empire. By releasing the apple into the Golden Horn, the project gently dismantles this image, shifting it from possession to passage, from monument to movement.
The golden apple ceases to function as a trophy. Instead, it becomes a message without an addressee, a symbol set free and allowed to drift, disappear, or transform.
Process and documentation
The project is documented through photography, preparatory images, and a series of photographs from the performative action. Video documentation will be added as an extension of the work. Together, these materials form a narrative that exists between image, gesture, and memory.
What remains is not the object itself, but the trace of its journey, a fleeting intervention connecting city and artist, myth and everyday life, holding and letting go.
Golden Apples: a visual poem in five episodes
Created for the 5th International Symposium of Land Art, 2025 | Rácalmás, Hungary
About the project
Aranyalmás Rácalmás (Golden Apple Rácalmás) is a site-specific visual poem exploring memory, dreams, and transience. The project’s name plays with Hungarian words: Rácalmás is a town whose name contains the word “apple,” and Aranyalmás adds the image of a “golden apple,” a rare fruit symbolizing the uniqueness and value of the place.
The series unfolds in five episodes, where golden apples guide the visitor through questions of presence, attention, and letting go. Each episode combines objects, gestures, participatory actions, and photography to create ephemeral narratives across the island and the bridge.
Prologue
On the island, among trees and grasses, the promise of paradise appears both evident and hidden.
Every apple becomes a question, a memory, a dream, and a treasure.
Some apples embark on a journey along the water, carried by currents of life and time; others remain, waiting to be discovered.
This project is about transience, choice, and transformation, and how we preserve and reshape memories.
Episodes Overview
Episode 1. Almák-Álmok / Apples-Dreams
Apples are the fruits of nature. Dreams are the hidden fruits of the soul.
Golden apples are hidden on the island among roots and driftwood. To those who find them – joy.
Episode 2. Álomfogó – Almafogó / Dreamcatcher – Apple Catcher
A special catcher gathers dreams and wishes. Visitors can tie pebbles, feathers, or knots to its threads, leaving traces of their own stories.
Episode 3. Fűggöny / Grass Curtain
Grasses woven into a mat frame a golden apple at the center – the heart of the island. Visitors can photograph through the golden apple, capturing fleeting moments.
Episode 4. Különleges? / Something Special?
Among a hundred crumpled paper balls, a golden apple shines in the sun. This object invites reflection on how we seek the special and how it transforms perception.
Episode 5. Híd álma – Hét alma / Dream of the Bridge – Seven Apples
Seven golden apples are cast into the water from the bridge, drifting away like dreams released into the flow of life. Visitors witness the happening and the act of letting go.
Process
The project was created during August 12–19, 2025 in Rácalmás, Hungary, as part of the symposium dedicated to Sándor Márai’s The Herbalist and in homage to the work of Mária Bartuszová.
An artist book documents the visual poem and the process of the Golden Apples project.
Exhibited at
2024-2025
Golden Apples is a series of site-specific gestures unfolding across different locations, cultures, and situations.
The project is centered around a simple object: a golden apple. A familiar image burdened with myths, promises, desire, power, and reward.
In these works, the apple loses its function as a trophy or possession. It appears, moves, is offered, released, or abandoned.
Each episode transforms the symbol through a different relation to place, time, and attention.
The project unfolds through temporary interventions, photography, participation, and disappearance.
The golden surface does not elevate the object, but exposes its fragility.
The work continues through traces, memory, and shifting perception.
Káptalanfüred, Hungary
site-specific action
Letters of Water unfolds as a temporary action.
Water is used to draw on stone.
The image appears and disappears.
The remaining water is carried back to a dried lake.
The work exists as an act of return.
It continues as traces in memory, in space, in attention.
Material
Action
Trace
Disappearance
Transfer
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Release
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2002 / 2024 / 2025
object, ready-made, action
site-specific / variable dimensions
A fence stops you.
A staircase invites you to move.
The same structure can be both.
At 90°, the fence becomes a staircase.
First realized in 2002.
The work continues.
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Total Landscape Experience
11.05.2025
Kőszikla Szurdok, Hungary
There is no gallery, no designated viewing point, and no fixed position from which to encounter the work. There is only a path through the gorge.
Fallen trees, protruding roots, water, rocks, narrow passages, and unstable ground made the passage difficult. The route had to be negotiated step by step.
The walk becomes a form of reading.
After a challenging stretch, we reached an area enclosed by sand walls. The walls were covered with inscriptions.
We examined and photographed them, leaving them undisturbed.
We did not understand the inscriptions. They were already disappearing with the sand. Why write them here?
To understand, one must walk.
The gorge does not illustrate an idea imposed upon it.
Its existing conditions — erosion, vegetation, water, fallen trees, rock formations, and the route itself — determine how the work unfolds.
The work follows the principles of Revealed Realism: we begin with what is already there and allow the conditions of the place to redirect the artistic action.
Here, the place determined not only how we moved, but what we encountered and how we responded to it.
The inscriptions were not ours to alter.
We left them as we found them and recorded them through photography.
The work does not attempt to decipher their words. It follows the impulse that brought them to this place.
Absence / From essence
2025
installation, participatory action, living archive
A reading corner appears ordinary.
A table.
A chair.
A stack of newspapers.
Something is missing.
But the newspapers cannot be read.
Parts of the text are missing.
Images disappear.
Words are cut away.
The absence is not empty.
It becomes a space where meaning is reconstructed.
Words disappear.
Images disappear.
The empty spaces begin to speak.
What disappears?
What remains?
The viewer enters the work.
Reading becomes searching.
Looking becomes interpretation.
The absence becomes visible.
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Absence becomes a space for imagination.
A place where what is missing
begins to matter.
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The work continues through absence.
The work continues through what is missing.
The work continues through participation.
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Proofs of Presence: Living Archive
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