The Apple

Zerya is a refugee woman in her 50s living in Paris. When she was only 22 years old, she had to leave her country because of the chemical gas thrown into the city of Halabja by Saddam Hussein on March 16, 1988. She has lived in France for 30 years. Visiting a painting exhibition in Paris, Zerya said, "This is not an apple," from Magritte's Betrayal of Images series. This painting reveals Zerya's past traumas. Zerya establishes both a historical and aesthetic relationship between the "apple with cloves", which expresses love in Kurdish mythology, the smell of apples in the gas used in the massacre, and Magritte's painting. She expresses the relationship of the painting with its own tragedy in a different performance.