Arkansas Black Apple

Hardly any other fruit is as omnipresent and as pregnant with meaning as the apple. In the run-up to documenta 13, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and artist Jimmie Durham planted two apple trees: one was the KZ-3 variety, which Korbinian Aigner had grown during his imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp. This tree was willfully destroyed in 2015. The other was the Arkansas Black Apple - a reminiscence of Durham's childhood in the USA. Both specimens bear witness to how human stories are inscribed in plant life (and vice versa).