performance

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.

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

To understand — one must walk

2025, Environmental Performance, Landscape Intervention, R², Revealed Realism

Total 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.

Old Gyenesdiás Quarry

Quarry, R², Revealed Realism

 The Quarry as Witness

Régi kőbánya, Gyenesdiás, Hungary

2020

On the northern edge of Gyenesdiás, on the slope of Pipa-hegy hill, lies an abandoned dolomite quarry. Its pale grey walls preserve traces of a much older landscape: more than 200 million years ago, this region was part of the shallow Tethys Sea, where marine sediments gradually formed the dolomite later exposed by extraction.

Today the quarry is overgrown and largely silent. Its eastern basin opens into a landscape of ravines, terraces, ledges, and stone formations resembling an ancient amphitheatre. Vegetation has begun to reclaim the abandoned site, while the exposed rock continues to reveal the marks of both geological time and human intervention.

Once an industrial site, the quarry has become a different kind of place — one in which geological memory, natural growth, and human traces coexist.

For R², it became a place to explore how a form can emerge from attentive observation rather than be imposed upon the landscape.

The Szamorodni Deer

In September 2020, during the Deerland art festival, R² explored several abandoned quarries around Gyenesdiás.

The original intention was to work in a different white quarry. On arrival, however, we found that extraction had resumed there. The planned intervention became impossible. Instead, we entered the old, forest-covered quarry on Pipa-hegy.

In a small clearing, the terrain itself suggested a form.

The original sketch — a two-headed elk — no longer corresponded to the place. Natural grooves and streams running through the ground already contained the outline of another deer.

The intervention was reduced to a gesture of revelation: pigments were scattered along the forms already present in the terrain.

The Szamorodni Deer emerged from the quarry rather than being drawn onto it.

A heart-like form appeared at its centre, later reading almost as a sun.

The Szamorodni Deer, 2020
Ephemeral geoglyph, approximately 3 × 5 m
Pigments: ochre, wine, chocolate; water
Technique: pigment splatter
Co-author & photographer: Dmitry Razhev

The geoglyph existed only temporarily. About a month later, it had disappeared, leaving no physical trace.

What remained was the documentation — and the experience of having followed a form that the landscape seemed to reveal.

Meditation Inside the Deer

A week after the geoglyph was created, R² returned to the site.

The outline of the deer became a space for a bodily action. A figure entered its form and remained within it, aligning the body with the temporary drawing in the ground.

The performance treated the geoglyph not as an image to be observed, but as a space to be inhabited.

The body became another layer within the landscape — briefly occupying a form that had itself emerged from the terrain.

Spiral with a Deer Hoof

Another intervention developed from the idea of the deer as a trace rather than an image.

Using a sponge stamp shaped as a deer hoof, R² created a double spiral in the quarry: one movement turning inward in ochre, another unfolding outward in red.

Seen from above, the spiral suggested a movement through time — contraction and expansion, return and departure.

The form existed only for the duration of the action.

Cave Deer

Near the quarry, we discovered a small man-made cave, probably created during stone extraction.

Inside this excavated space, R² staged Cave Deer, a photographic performance in which the human body and its shadow became temporary images on the stone walls.

The cave introduced another layer to the site: beneath the open quarry landscape, the extracted stone became an enclosed space of shadow, memory, and presence.

The work shifted the encounter from the exposed surface of the quarry to its interior.

Revealed Realism

The Gyenesdiás quarry became a particularly direct example of RR-method: the work changed because the place changed the conditions of the work.

The original site was unavailable. The original sketch no longer fitted the terrain. Instead of forcing the planned image onto another landscape, we followed what the new site offered.

The deer was already there — in the grooves, streams, stones, and contours of the ground.

The artistic gesture was to make it visible.

The work therefore did not begin with an image and move toward the landscape. It began with attention, and allowed the landscape to determine the image.

The quarry was not a backdrop. It was the source of the form.

Digital traces

Instagram · Régi kőbánya

Instagram · The Szamorodni Deer

Instagram · The Szamorodni Deer

Instagram · Meditation Inside the Deer

Instagram · Spiral with a Deer Hoof

Instagram · Cave Deer

Pusztamiské Gravel Quarry

2020, Quarry, R²

Series: The Quarry as Witness

Pusztamiské Gravel Quarry, Hungary

2020

Pusztamiské Gravel Quarry is an active extraction site south of the village of Pusztamiske, Hungary. Parts of the quarry are still in operation, while others have already been abandoned.

Its exposed walls reveal contrasting layers of white, ochre, orange, and pale sand. Beneath them lie traces of the Pannonian Sea: fossilised shells, sea urchins, corals, and other marine organisms preserved in the gravel and sand.

For R², these walls became a way of encountering geological time not as an abstract scale, but as something visible in colour, texture, movement, and material.

Walls the Color of Time

The exposed quarry walls became the starting point for a series of visual observations.

Their colours and structures record different layers of geological and human history. Ochre, limestone, sand, clay, and darker mineral traces form a landscape in which colour is not simply visual, but material evidence.

We observed the walls as changing surfaces rather than fixed images. Light moved across them, shadows altered their appearance, and the presence of bodies introduced another temporary layer.

Ritual with Shadows

Among the tall orange and ochre walls, R² staged a performance with deer masks.

The figures moved slowly through the quarry, following the contours of the terrain and the changing light. The masks connected the action to the deer that inhabit the surrounding landscape, while the exposed strata placed the bodies within a much deeper temporal field.

The performance was not intended to reconstruct a historical scene or illustrate a myth. It was a way of being physically present in a landscape where geological time, industrial extraction, animal movement, and human perception meet.

The shadows cast by the bodies became part of the work — temporary forms appearing on the sediment and disappearing as the light changed.

In the Deer’s Footsteps

In an inactive section of the quarry, we discovered a trail of deer tracks crossing the exposed terrain.

The tracks followed a path up the slope and suddenly disappeared.

This encounter became the starting point for the video In the Deer’s Footsteps.

The work follows a trace that leads beyond what can be seen, turning the landscape into a space of uncertainty, encounter, and return.

In the Deer’s Footsteps
Video
Director & Camera: Marina Razheva
Actor: Dmitry Razhev
Editing & Color: Sasha Snova
Music: Vladimir Razhev

The Thread

Another part of the quarry formed a landscape of pale sand mounds resembling a soft labyrinth.

Here, the thread became a line of movement through the terrain — a fragile connection between two presences approaching each other from opposite directions.

Rather than illustrating a predetermined story, the action allowed the physical structure of the quarry to become part of the work. The landscape itself determined the path, the distance, and the eventual encounter.

The Thread
Video
Directors & Camera: Marina & Dmitry Razhev
Editing & Color: Sasha Snova
Music: Vladimir Razhev

Revealed Realism

Pusztamiské became an example of how Revealed Realism works through attention rather than predetermined form.

The quarry offered the walls, the colours, the tracks, the shadows, the labyrinth-like terrain. Each became a starting point for a different action.

The works did not seek to add meaning to the landscape, but to enter into what was already present and allow its conditions to redirect the artistic process.

The quarry was not a backdrop. It was the condition of the work.

Digital traces:

Instagram · Pusztamiské Quarry

Instagram · Walls the Color of Time

Instagram · Ritual with Shadows

Instagram · In the Deer’s Footsteps

Instagram · The Thread

Wedding of the Tower and the Metro

2006, Happening, R²

2006

Format: public performance, happening, video documentation (44 minutes)

Location: Russia, Yekaterinburg city center and metro stations

Partners: State Center for Contemporary Art (GCCSA), ParaRam gallery

About the Project

Wedding of the Tower and the Metro is a multi-day public performance reimagining key landmarks of Yekaterinburg through the lens of local Ural traditions. The project creates a new living mythology for the city by symbolically uniting two urban giants — the Tower (he), an unfinished TV tower and prominent telecommunications structure, and the Metro (she), the city’s underground transit system.

The project unfolds as a ritual action reflecting deep archetypes and urban legends, expressing both the hopes and fears of the city’s residents. Through ceremonial acts and symbolic gestures, the performance seeks to harmonize unseen forces within the city and prevent potential catastrophe.

Background: The Question of the Tower and the Metro

  • Concerns about a possible earthquake in the Ural region have been growing.
  • For over 250 years, towers and underground spaces have been seen as the city’s main mythical and generative symbols.
  • Today, the unfinished TV tower is the city’s apex tower symbol, while the metro is its main subterranean presence.
  • These two giants effectively “meet” near the Circus area in the city center.

The Myth

The Tower and the Metro represent vast, intangible City Giants—beings with immense, mysterious bodies resting beneath the urban layers. Though currently still, their forces pull toward each other. Should they awaken suddenly or clash, disaster such as an earthquake could follow.

The myth is not just a story but includes ritual actions designed to control these forces and protect the city.

The Ritual — The Wedding

The Giants’ longing for union has reached a peak — the time has come to hold their Wedding.

If this ritual is not performed, the Giants may pass each other by, and the symbolic “Child” — the city’s future potential — will never be born. Alternatively, a chaotic union could bring disaster.

Additional Context

This myth draws from ancient, pre-Ellin traditions and familiar motifs of Titans and Titanesses. The Tower and Metro stand as symbolic Titans within the city landscape.

The myth partly explains the origins and roles of these urban forms and partly prescribes complex ritual actions that help channel and contain hidden powers, ensuring the city’s well-being.

The Performance

On August 25–26, 2006, Yekaterinburg witnessed a collective celebration of the Wedding of the Tower and the Metro.

This ritual involved local artists, residents, and guests, bringing the myth to life through a series of staged actions:

Public announcement of the upcoming Wedding (2006, August 18).

The solemn Wedding ceremony — a modern ritual binding the Giants (2006, August 25).

A communal feast — an ancient ritual that unites participants and seals the ceremony’s success (2006 August 25).

The Fertilization rite — participants crafted miniature Tower figures symbolizing the Tower’s “seed” (2006 August 26).

And discreetly placed them throughout metro stations and trains (2006 August 26).

Outcome

The action transcended artistic mystification, becoming a real and effective ritual. Just days after the event, news came that the long-frozen metro construction would resume.

Exhibitions and Screenings

September 2006 — International Festival Stop! Who’s Coming?, Moscow, special project of the Yekaterinburg branch of the State Center for Contemporary Art (GCCSA) StolpoTvorenie.

November 2006 — Video screening at the ParaRam art salon, Yekaterinburg.

2007 — As part of the StolpoTvorenie special project (Yekaterinburg GCCSA), nominated for the Innovation All-Russian competition award in the category Regional Contemporary Art Project.

2023 — Documentation of the project participated in the archival exhibition “Art without a ticket: the history of public art in Yekaterinburg” at the Ural Branch of the A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

Wedding of the Tower and the Metro

2006

Фото 1 (главное, крупное, по центру)

Лучший кадр со свадьбы — не башня, не метро, а момент действия: люди, ритуал, ощущение события.

A city does not exist only of stone, concrete, and structures.

It also exists through stories, beliefs, and invisible forces.

Телебашня в городе.

In Yekaterinburg, towers and underground spaces have long been powerful symbols of the city landscape.

Фото 3

Метро: вход, станция, тоннель.

At the beginning of the 21st century, two extreme manifestations appeared:

the unfinished TV Tower — the highest expression of the Tower,

and the Metro — the deepest expression of the Underground.

Фото 4

Общий городской план / район Цирка, если есть.

They came close to each other.

Almost meeting.

According to the myth, the City Giants existed before the city itself.
They were revealed to humans through the Tower and the Metro.

Фото 5

(фото, где появляется ощущение мифа, например участники или башня с людьми)

From this coincidence, a myth emerged.

The Tower and the Metro were imagined not as constructions, but as manifestations of ancient forces.

Фото 6

Любой образ с ритуальным ощущением / участники

According to the myth, these forces had existed before the city itself.

Perhaps even before the mountains.

The Tower and the Metro were not merely structures.
They were manifestations of vast and incomprehensible beings.

The Tower and the Metro were imagined as manifestations of City Giants — vast, incomprehensible beings revealed to humans through their visible forms.

Фото 7

Свадебный момент

Their attraction had reached its peak.

The time had come for their Wedding.

Фото 8

Участники

But their union required a ritual.

Without it, they could pass each other by, and the Child — the future potential of the city — would never be born.

Without a ritual, their uncontrolled encounter could bring catastrophe.

Фото 9

Объявление / газета

The myth became a public action.

On August 25–26, 2006, the Wedding of the Tower and the Metro took place in Yekaterinburg.

Фото 10

Церемония

Artists, residents, and guests became participants in the ritual.

The performance unfolded through several stages:

Фото 11

Объявление

Announcement of the Wedding

Фото 12

Церемония

The Wedding ceremony

Фото 13

Пир

The communal feast

Фото 14

Изготовление башенок

The Fertilization rite

Participants created miniature images of the Tower — symbolic seeds.

Фото 15

Метро, размещение башенок

The seeds were carried underground and placed inside the Metro.

The ritual was completed.

Фото 16

Фото после ритуала / участники / след

A fragmentary urban myth became a lived experience.

The work crossed the boundary between artistic fiction and reality.

Фото 17

Если есть публикация о возобновлении строительства метро

Days after the ritual, news appeared that construction of the metro, frozen for several years, would resume.

The work proposes a new urban mythology.

The work continues as urban mythology.

traces of the work →

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.

Sower. Dispersion of White

Malevich's Brigade

2005 | Performance

Exhibition: Not-Portraits (Контур как повод)
Venue: ParaRam Gallery, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Date: 10 March 2005
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade

The Performance

At the opening of the collective exhibition Not-Portraits, the Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade presented Sower. Dispersion of White.

The action began with the Sower scattering white squares.

The Malers then “fertilised” them.

As the squares “ripened”, the visitors were invited to gather the harvest — what had begun as white.

The simple sequence turned a familiar act of painting into a small ritual of sowing, growth and gathering.

White was no longer just a colour or a surface. It became something that could be scattered, transformed and collected.

The Exhibition Context

The performance took place during the opening of Not-Portraits, a collective exhibition in which artists drew one another’s outlines and filled the resulting silhouettes with their own interpretations.

The Brigade’s action introduced another form of collective transformation into the opening: instead of producing a fixed image, it set a process in motion and allowed the visitors to complete it.

Documentation

Photos: Tatyana Sekacheva, Dmitry Razhev

Original project documentation →

Back to Malers’ Brigade