irreversibility

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.

Aranyalmás Rácalmás – The Golden Apples of Rácalmás

2025, Golden Apples, Happening

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

Letters of Water

2025

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

___

Release

__________________________________________________

traces of the work

THE ANGLE OF VIEW or Fence becomes stairs

2002, 2024, 2025

2002 / 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.

__________________________________________________

traces of the work

The Golden Eggs

2002, 2003, 2004, 2013, 2024

2002–2024

long-term conceptual series

What is the sacred meaning of an old fairy tale about the golden hen known to everyone from early childhood? What was lost and what was gained when the egg broke?

The same questions are raised in many myths of the old and new worlds: about the original egg, the creation of the world, the legend of the golden age. Ideas of good and evil and what is
being done on time.

This myth is relevant at all times and at each new moment acquires new semantic shades.

2002
2004
2005
2024

Exhibition history :

  • 2002 — Living the Simplest Thing, Art-Novosibirsk Gallery Festival, Novosibirsk, Russia
  • 2002 — Shakespeare’s Testament, Ural Museum of Youth, Yekaterinburg, Russia
  • 2004 — Tasting Ball, Pushkin House, Yekaterinburg, Russia
  • 2004 — New Mythology, International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Karaganda, Kazakhstan
  • 2005 — High-Five, Elovoy House, Yekaterinburg, Russia
  • 2013 — Art Objects on a Book Theme, Belinsky Library, Yekaterinburg, Russia
  • 2024 — JELEN — JELENÉS — JELEN|ÉS, 4th International Land Art Symposium, Rácalmás, Hungary

An Offering to the Sphinx

traces of the work

The intervention remained in the space after the action without supervision or protection.

The future of the golden apple remains unknown.

It may have been taken away, moved, preserved, damaged, or gradually destroyed by weather and time.

The work survives through photographs, video fragments, memory, and retellings.

Instagram publications and video documentation became part of the afterlife of the project.

Realized in the Zsolnay Quarter, Pécs, Hungary, 14 May 2024.

дополнительные фотографии, backstage, кадр со мной, Instagram FB screenshots, video stills, later publications, выставочные следы, process photos.

AN OFFERING TO THE SPHINX

2024, Golden Apples, R²

site-specific intervention / temporary guerrilla sculpture

Zsolnay Quarter, Pécs, Hungary

Materials: apple, acrylic

A golden apple moved through the historical labyrinth of the Zsolnay Quarter, passing between exhibition space, street, ornament, reflection, and ruin.

For a brief moment, the object entered the official space of the Zsolnay Golden Age exhibition, then returned again to the open environment of the city.

The apple appeared among ceramic vessels, architectural fragments, roots, water, staircases, and decorative structures. Its movement through the quarter was documented as a sequence of temporary relations between the object and the surrounding space.

The journey ended near one of the ceramic Sphinx sculptures guarding the staircase.

The apple was left there as an offering without inscription, protection, or explanation.

…

…

…

…

…

After the action, the object remained in the space without control over what would happen next.

It could disappear, decay, be taken away, or continue its movement through the city.

The work existed as a temporary intervention between public art, rumor, object, and memory.

…

traces of the work

Cultural Transit

Malevich's Brigade

2016 | Exhibition

Venue: Cultural Transit Foundation, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Dates: 14–18 March 2016
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade

From Waste Back into Art

The exhibition began with something found and discarded.

About a year before the project, a member of the Brigade found two packs of unused coated paper posters near a residential building — one hundred identical sheets, each printed with the image of a woman’s bare back.

A small portion of the find was initially used as paper for individual paintings. The remaining ninety-four sheets were brought to the exhibition space of the Cultural Transit Foundation, where the Brigade took brushes to them.

Instead of erasing the original image, the artists worked with it, over it and around it. The same figure began to appear as Leda, Europa, an axe, a green onion and many other forms. The original image remained visible, while its meaning kept changing.

What had been produced for another purpose and then discarded became material for a new collective work.

As the Brigade described it: “A return to the territory of art of creative efforts that had moved into the mercantile.”

Collective Work

The works were produced directly in the exhibition space by the Brigade. The large number of identical sheets allowed the same starting image to be repeated, altered and reinterpreted again and again.

The exhibition did not arrive at a single final image. Instead, the original figure passed through a series of transformations, becoming different things without losing its visible trace of what it had been.

Participation: Elena Gladysheva, Vladimir Romanov, Marina Razheva, Viktor Oborotistov

Photos by Dmitry Razhev, Viktor Oborotistov and Marina Kozlachkova.

Back to Malers’ Brigade

Möbius Pretzel

2006, R²

August 19, 2006

Format: public performance, happening, video documentation (6:41)

Location: Russia, Yekaterinburg

Partners: State Center for Contemporary Art (GCCSA), Yekaterinburg bread factory Vseslav

The art project “The Möbius Pretzel” is part of a multi-stage process of creating an urban mythology.


It transfers a conceptual idea into public space, transforming the artistic act into a communal ritual. The mythologeme appears as an edible Möbius strip, and its consumption becomes a form of communion — a symbolic sharing of the city’s “body.”

The format of the project embodies a symbiosis of artistic performance, PR action, urban myth, and public ritual.

A record-breaking pretzel, made from a four-layer sponge ribbon (with a circumference of 4.5 meters, a height of 20 cm, and a weight of 52 kg), was generously baked by the Yekaterinburg bread factory Vseslav.

Ingredients used: Flour – 11 kg, Sugar – 8.7 kg, Eggs – 11 kg, Vegetable oil – 0.6 kg, Apricot confiture – 16 kg, Sugar syrup (for soaking) – 7.3 kg

Biscuit mass: 26 kg Exact dimensions: 1.5 × 2 meters Total weight: 52 kg
Length of the sponge ribbon: 4.5 meters

From the author:

A city is a multitude of layers — coexisting within a single whole, yet often not only disconnected, but unaware of each other’s existence.

A simplified model of the city might be imagined as a pretzel made from a multi-layered sponge ribbon, twisted into a Möbius strip — a kind of “pretzelization” of a mathematical ideal.

The Möbius strip possesses some curious properties: it has only one continuous surface, no “other” side, no inside or outside, and any object moving along it is gradually turned 180 degrees. In other words — it flips things upside down.

This leads one to think that perhaps our existence has no “reverse.” Everything — hellish abysses, heavenly gardens, mysterious depths of the spirit, and other dimensions — is already here, now, with us, on this side. That is to say: thisworldly.

To “absorb” the city, one must thoroughly chew the pretzel. This can be done extensively — gnawing on a single layer, or intensively — by biting through all the layers at once. Though in this case, of course, only within the limits of one fragment.