Golden Apples

The Golden Apple of Istanbul

Golden Apples, R²

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.

Aranyalmás Book

Golden Apples

artist’s book

Materials: paper, glue, jute, photography
Dimensions: 35 × 45 × 8 cm
Year: 2025

Aranyalmás Book is an artist’s book conceived as a tactile object and a visual poem.
It is assembled from crumpled paper, sewn with jute threads, and incorporates photographs of objects and actions from the project Golden Apples.

The book has no rigid binding or fixed form.
Each page exists as an individual fragment that can be turned, revisited, and shifted. Through handling and viewing, the book gradually changes: it wears down, loosens, and retains traces of touch and time.

Turning the pages becomes part of the work itself.
The sound of rustling paper, the resistance of the material, and the weight of the pages shape the experience of reading as a physical act rather than a purely visual one.

Aranyalmás Book engages with themes of memory, choice, and letting go.
Golden apples appear here as images of attention and gift — something that can be found, held briefly, and then released.

Aranyalmás Rácalmás – The Golden Apples of Rácalmás

2025, Golden Apples

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

  • “Bridge” exhibition, 2025, Rácalmás, Hungary
  • “In the Footsteps of Time” exhibition, 2026, Várnegyed Galéria, Budapest, Hungary

Golden Apples

Golden Apples, R²

2024-2025

Golden Apples is a series of site-specific projects exploring transformation, ritual, and perception. Through subtle gestures, objects, and photography, ordinary spaces are turned into stages for ephemeral interventions.

2025 The Golden Apple of Istanbul
2025 Aranyalmás Rácalmás
2024 An Offering to the Sphinx

The golden apple—symbol of desire, knowledge, and exchange—becomes a catalyst for attention and meaning. Each episode engages the environment, participants, and the artist, creating fleeting narratives that exist in memory and image.

The series works as a conceptual principle, allowing the idea of “golden apples” to unfold across locations and forms, while each episode remains unique.

An Offering to the Sphinx

2024, Golden Apples, Micro Monuments, Minik, R²

Installed May 14, 2024
Zsolnay Quarter, Pécs (Hungary)
Materials: apple, acrylic

The golden apple embarked on a journey through the historical labyrinth of the Zsolnay Quarter — between time and space, history and modernity, art and the street, matter and reflection.

The apple entered the exhibition space for a moment, becoming part of the “official” history of the Zsolnay Golden Age, then stepped beyond its boundaries, dissolving into the real environment.

Its journey was documented in a series of photographs: the apple reflected the sun, glided across textures, tasting the matter of time. Each frame captures a moment of choice between motion and stillness, disappearance and presence.

The offering took place beside one of the two ceramic Sphinx sculptures guarding the staircase. The reflection from the golden surface altered the expression on the Sphinx’s face. Was it an illusion, a play of light, or the past come to life, accepting the gift?

The project invites reflection on how values, both material and immaterial, move through time, transforming meanings and leaving a trace in our perception.

The project was carried out by the R² team.

From the authors:
“We left the apple there, by the Sphinx. What happened next? We don’t know, but we can imagine several scenarios.

Perhaps the Apple disappeared—someone took it. Maybe it was a passerby who saw value or mystery in it. Maybe a tourist took it as a souvenir, or a child believed they’d found a magical artifact.

Or the Apple remained in place but changed—rain and wind began to wash away the gold, revealing the living matter beneath the surface. It began to decay, becoming part of the urban environment, vanishing somewhere between art and nature.

Perhaps the Apple became part of the Quarter—someone moved it elsewhere, continuing its journey. Maybe it appeared by another sculpture, or ended up inside one of the Zsolnay ceramic workshops.

We like to believe the Apple turned into a legend—even if it disappeared physically, its story remains. Someone will tell it again, someone will search for its traces, and someone might catch a fleeting glint on the Sphinx’s face and remember this moment.

In this context, the Apple is a temporary guerrilla sculpture—installed without permission, yet altering the perception of the space. It intervened in the environment of the Zsolnay Quarter, entered into a dialogue with the Sphinx, and disappeared, leaving behind only memory and photographic trace.

This offering was a fleeting gesture, but it sharpened the boundary between presence and disappearance, art and everyday life, the material and the symbolic.”

The project on Instagram и Video