Explore our new exhibition featuring Anna Zvyagintseva’s art from “What Lasts Longer Than Hope?” in Cyprus. The author creates a large installation with photography & apple seeds, plus a dozen sketches with apples, looking for shadows, shapes, memories, and associations.

Release

The true symbolism and meaning of simple things are hidden behind the routine and everyday life. For example, an apple is one of the most widespread and rich image symbols in culture. Instead, in everyday life, it becomes something familiar and elementary. In particular, for Ukrainian artists, it is the subject of a common painting study: sketching the shape and working with colors and tones is a fairly common daily practice of painting, where the apple is an elementary unit of still life.
The author creates a dozen sketches with apples, looking for shadows, shapes, memories, and associations. She recalls her family’s apple harvesting of autumn in the garden, which they barely manage to keep up with, the fruits quickly deteriorate, rot, and return to the ground. And because of their availability, they seem to lose value.
In Cyprus, such abundance is embodied by the fruit trees of tangerines, lemons, and avocados, which produce several harvests a year. As a result, the fruits rot in even larger piles near the trees. In the end, burning them in such abundance may even seem necessary, becoming routine.
However, for Ukrainians, the sight of ash has recently come to signify the lost value of life and prosperity, rather than being proof of it. The ashes of lemons and the fruitful abundance of apples have combined into a kind of cycle of life where abundance and lack coexist at the same time: the burning of the excess harvest, but the happiness of a Ukrainian prisoner of war after eating the first fruit in 8 months, which now tastes like a return home.

— Halyna Hleba , The Curator.

Installation views