Program

Änuar Düisenbinov is a Kazakhstani poet, multimedia artist, curator, and translator.

For the past 15 years, he has been actively engaged in various projects across Central Asia, collaborating with institutions such as the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, CTM Festival, Literature Without Borders, the Hayward Gallery, and the Venice Biennale, among others. Together with Rustem Myrzakhmetov, Änuar co-founded the spoken word and experimental music collective Балхаш снится, a cornerstone of Almaty’s independent music scene, which has also participated in Barsakelmes, the inaugural performance launching the public program at the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture.

In his works, Änuar often refers to traditional practices and belief systems, emphasising how they have evolved in response to shifting and often deteriorating social and political contexts, both past and present. His poetry and spoken-word interventions are inventive and playful, rooted in layered symbolism, yet they pointedly challenge the ways dominant narratives co-opt and instrumentalise once-sacred practices, transforming what was meant to serve the community into tools of identity politics or nation-building used by elites and those holding onto power.Änuar Düisenbinov is a Kazakhstani poet, multimedia artist, curator, and translator.

Madina Sadybekova is a Korean/Kazakh curator and researcher from Almaty, whose practice primarily focuses on sonic arts that engage with geopolitical and sociopolitical contexts.

Having studied how aesthetics shape experience and collective memory in cases of toppling and removing colonial monuments in contemporary Kazakhstan, she now works with hearing and listening as embodied practices, paying close attention to how sound affects bodies exposed to various coercive conditions: from concrete violence to dispossession, land loss, and forced migration. Reflecting on her own diasporic experience, physically removed from these at times excruciating contexts, Madina uses this distance to explore how sound can also carry resilience and hope.

Madina holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London and currently works as a curator and art manager at Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture in Almaty.

Stas Shärifulla is a Basel-based artist and scholar studying how listening shapes identity and memory.

Born and raised in Eastern Siberia, with Yılan Bashqort ancestry, he explores the auditory nature of North and Central Asian autochthonous cultures, where listening and sounding have historically been more important than writing. Drawing on his own dis–re–connection to this heritage, Stas is primarily focused on how settler colonialism subjugates and distorts Indigenous knowledge, reducing its sociopolitical purpose to the production of exotic museum artifacts — and how to undo these dynamics. Working with both traditional instruments and computer music tools, he practices in a wide range of media, including freeform composition, live listening sessions, public talks and interventions, installations, and more.

Stas is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Basel, a guest docent and mentor at the Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK FHNW, and a co-curator of the thematic strand and artistic research project Resynthesising the Traditional at the CTM Festival.