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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Letters of Water
2025, traces of the work2025
The Golden Apple of Istanbul
2025, Golden Apples, R²Self-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.
Aranyalmás Rácalmás – The Golden Apples of Rácalmás
2025, Golden Apples, HappeningGolden 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
- “Bridge” exhibition, 2025, Rácalmás, Hungary
- “In the Footsteps of Time” exhibition, 2026, Várnegyed Galéria, Budapest, Hungary
Golden Apples
2024, 2025, Golden Apples, R²2024-2025
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.
Letters of Water
2025Káptalanfüred, 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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THE ANGLE OF VIEW or Fence becomes stairs
2002, 2024, 20252002 / 2024 / 2025
object, ready-made, action
A fence stops you.
A staircase invites you to move.
The same structure can be both.
At 90°, the fence becomes a staircase.
Opposites transform into each other when the angle of view shifts.
First realized in 2002.
The work continues.
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To understand — one must walk
2025, Environmental Performance, Landscape Intervention, R², Revealed RealismTotal Landscape Experience
11.05.2025
Kőszikla Szurdok, Hungary
Total Landscape Experience
This work begins where the exhibition space ends.
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.
The route leads through fallen trees, exposed roots, water, stones, narrow passages, and unstable ground. Walking requires attention. The body adjusts to the terrain; the pace changes; familiar ways of moving become unreliable.
The landscape is not presented as a backdrop or an object of contemplation. It determines how the work can be experienced.
To understand, one must walk.
The work unfolds through movement rather than observation. What appears at first to be an ordinary landscape gradually becomes a sequence of situations in which the body is asked to notice, negotiate, pause, and continue.
There is no single image that contains the work.
Its form exists in the accumulated experience of the passage: the changing ground beneath the feet, the need to find a way around an obstacle, the sound of water, the pressure of branches, the shifting distance between bodies, and the awareness of not being entirely in control of the route.
The walk becomes a form of reading.
The terrain is the text.
The body is the instrument.
Attention is the method.
A Landscape That Acts
The gorge does not illustrate an idea imposed upon it.
Its existing conditions — erosion, vegetation, water, fallen trees, rock formations, traces of passage — determine the structure of the encounter.
The work therefore follows the principles of Revealed Realism: rather than constructing a new environment, we attend to what the place already offers and allow its conditions to redirect the artistic action.
What is revealed is not a hidden object, but a different relationship with the landscape.
The Route
The work can be understood as a sequence of transitions:
Entering — leaving the familiar conditions of the everyday world.
Adjusting — allowing the body to respond to an unfamiliar terrain.
Crossing — moving through obstacles rather than viewing them from a distance.
Attending — noticing details that become visible only through slowed movement.
Continuing — accepting that the route has no predetermined visual conclusion.
The work ends when the walk ends.
But the landscape encountered along the way does not necessarily end there.
To understand — one must walk.
Απουσία / Απ’ ουσία
2025, Happening2025
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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