The Golden Apple of Istanbul

2025, 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.

Golden Apples

2024, 2025, Golden Apples, R²

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.

Anatomy of Cities

Anatomy of the city, Malevich's Brigade, R²

Anatomy of Cities is an ongoing artistic research into the city as a living, changing body.

Rather than describing the city, R² approaches it through shifts in attention — listening, looking, movement, colour, memory, and encounters with what usually remains unnoticed.

The city becomes a field of subtle discoveries. Perception is not simply a way of experiencing it, but the medium through which another city begins to appear.

Projects:

PanGorMonium
A virtual instrument for listening to the city.

Shoot for Color
A practice of looking at the city through colour.

Together, these projects explore different ways of entering the urban environment: through listening and through looking.

Shoot for Color

Anatomy of the city, Malevich's Brigade, R²

Shoot for Color is a participatory practice based on looking for colour in the urban environment.

The project began in Yekaterinburg in 2004 and has returned in different forms and places:

2004 · Yekaterinburg
2008 · Yekaterinburg
2018 · Keszthely

Participants walk through the city with a simple task: to look for colour.

The same streets can look different when approached through this task. Buildings, walls, objects, vegetation, signs, surfaces, and small details become subjects for photography.

The project has taken the form of photo marathons, collective actions, and individual walks. There is no competition and no predetermined result. The route and the photographs depend on what each participant encounters.

Within Anatomy of Cities, Shoot for Color is one way of working with the city through visual attention. PanGorMonium approaches the same question through listening.

Works

Shoot for Color. Yekaterinburg
2004

Shoot for Color. Colors of Yekaterinburg
2008

Shoot for Color. Keszthely
2018

Cappadocia: A Very Curious Place

R²

Published in “Yugra / Real Estate” Magazine, Issue 3, May 2008
Section: Architectural Impressions. Personal Dimension
By Marina Razheva and Dmitry Razhev
Photography by the authors

This early publication captures one of our first joint reflections on space, presence, and the surreal logic of landscapes. The article, though significantly edited and abridged by the publisher, offers a glimpse into the layered perception of place that would later evolve into our method of Betweenness. Cappadocia’s dreamlike terrain, full of voids, traces, and transformations prompted a personal and poetic response that blurred the lines between architecture, memory, and myth. This was one of our first attempts to “write from inside the landscape,” sensing the echoes beneath the surface.

R²

Extension of practice, R²

R² is a long-term collaboration between artist Marina Razheva and researcher Dmitry Razhev. They have worked together since 1989, exploring landscapes, cities, archives, and traces of human presence. Dmitry researches the history, geology and materials of a site. Marina and Dmitry decide together where and how to act.

Their work brings research and artistic practice into the same process. It begins with close attention to places, objects and situations, and with an investigation of what can be established through evidence and direct encounter.

Their different practices are not kept separate. Evidence can constrain, redirect or complicate the artistic action, while artistic action can make another aspect of the evidence or situation newly active. The work emerges from this ongoing exchange.

Over decades of working together, this practice has developed into Revealed Realism (RR), a method of working with reality through close attention and minimal intervention.

Selected Projects:

To understand — one must walk

Selected Publication:

Cappadocia: A Very Curious Place (2008)

CV PDF

Portfolio PDF

Enigma Travel Detective

R²

During travel, there are moments when ordinary description fails to explain the strange coherence or inner contradiction of a place. Unexpected details, paradoxes, and inconsistencies create a sense of perceptual dissonance, as if the visible reality is missing an important layer.

In response, historical sources, local myths, forgotten narratives, symbolic associations, and metacultural models are used not to fictionalize the place, but to approach a deeper alignment with its hidden logic and atmosphere.

The method does not seek factual reconstruction alone. Instead, it works through attentive observation, comparison, walking, intuition, and associative investigation in order to reveal latent connections embedded within the landscape.

Enigma Travel Detective treats travel as a form of field inquiry in which places gradually disclose concealed structures, unresolved narratives, and unstable meanings that cannot be grasped through direct observation alone.

1, 2, 3, 4 and others

To understand — one must walk

2025, Landscape Intervention, R², Revealed Realism

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.

A Landscape That Acts

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.

Posolontsy – Salt walkers in Thailand

2024, Micro Monuments, Minik, R²

Monument to Travelers

Installed on 16.12.2024

Ao Leuk, Koh Tao, Thailand

Bioceramics — salt, flour, water, acrylic pigment
7 × 5 × 9 cm

How does a monument travel?

From 26 November to 16 December 2024, two small figures travelled with us from Hungary to Thailand. Along the way, they were brought into contact with places, monuments, landscapes, and sites of cultural significance.

They travelled from Budapest Airport to Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and finally Koh Tao. At each stage, we looked for a place where they might belong.

The figures were made from salt, flour, and water — a material that could travel easily but could not remain unchanged.

On Koh Tao, heavy rain began to soften them. Their bodies started to swell and change.

Instead of protecting them from the weather, we brought them to a spirit house near Ao Leuk beach.

There, the little travelers were left to negotiate with the place.

The next day, the weather cleared.

Whether this was coincidence, ritual, or simply the logic of the landscape remains open.

The monument was never intended to be permanent. Its journey, its encounters, and its eventual transformation are part of the work.

A Minik is not designed to occupy a place indefinitely. It enters a place, stays for a while, and becomes subject to the conditions it encounters.

Here, the monument itself became a traveler.

And perhaps the final destination was not a location at all, but a temporary agreement with the place.

R², 2024

DEER STONES

2018, 2020, 2021, 2024, R², Revealed Realism

Hungary

2018, 2020, 2021, 2024

What happens when an ancient image survives without surviving in its original form?

Deer Stones is an ongoing R² investigation into the recurring image of the deer in stone — from ancient megaliths and ritual monuments to contemporary sculptures and accidental structures found in the Hungarian landscape.

The project began with a simple observation: some contemporary Hungarian monuments unexpectedly recall the form and imagery of ancient deer stones. Others have no connection to them at all, yet begin to resemble them once they are encountered through the same visual and symbolic lens.

Rather than reconstructing a historical tradition, we followed these unexpected correspondences.

Ancient Deer Stones

Deer stones are ancient stone stelae associated with the Bronze and early Iron Age cultures of Mongolia and neighbouring regions of Siberia. Their surfaces carry images of flying deer, weapons, ornaments, and solar symbols.

The deer is not represented simply as an animal. Its recurring upward movement, elaborate antlers, and association with solar imagery suggest a figure moving between different realms.

For R², this image became a point of departure rather than a subject to be illustrated.

Deer stone, Khovsgol Province, Mongolia from

Modern Deer Stones

In Hungary, we encountered several contemporary stone monuments whose forms and imagery unexpectedly echoed this ancient vocabulary.

Among them were Tree of Life (Életfa) by Péterfy László and Szerdahelyi Károly in Zalaegerszeg, and The Conquest of the Homeland (Honfoglalás) by Harmat Ferenc with Piszter Péter in Balatongyörök.

We photographed them, researched their histories, and made frottages from their surfaces.

The frottage allowed the monument to enter the work through direct physical contact. Stone became paper; relief became line; the surface of an existing monument became a new, portable image.

Materials: paper, wax crayons
Frottages: 2018, 2020, 2021, 2024

Field of Deer Stones

Another encounter took place south of Nyirád, where we found a group of concrete posts on the grounds of a long-abandoned military installation.

Their original function had been forgotten or was no longer immediately legible. Yet their arrangement on the hillside unexpectedly recalled rows of ancient standing stones.

Were they monuments?

Of course not.

But what happens when an ordinary utilitarian structure begins to acquire the visual presence of a monument?

We photographed the site and digitally altered the images, allowing the accidental resemblance to become more pronounced.

The Field of Deer Stones emerged from this gap between what an object is and what it can become through perception.

This project became an example of Revealed Realism: the work does not begin with the invention of an image and then search for a place to put it.

The place comes first.

A monument, a fragment, a concrete post, a trace, or a surface is encountered. Attention establishes a connection. The artistic act then reveals or amplifies a possibility already latent in the object.

The meaning is neither simply found nor simply invented.

It appears between the thing and the way we look at it.

Deer as a recurring figure

Across the different sites, the deer gradually ceases to be a single archaeological symbol.

It becomes a moving figure — appearing in stone, in contemporary sculpture, in accidental structures, in traces, and in the imagination.

The project connects these appearances without claiming that they share a common origin.

What matters is the moment when an image returns.

Deer Stones forms part of the broader HartLand project, in which the deer becomes a way of tracing relationships between landscape, memory, movement, human presence, and the persistence of symbols.