KORKUT2026

Rites
of Eternal Wind

Il Korkut Sonic Arts Triennale

Dedicated to sound and listening, the Triennale creates a space for a wide range of sonic practices without restricting them by institutional boundaries. Over the course of two months, Rites of Eternal Wind will host sound installations and live events, listening sessions and soundwalks, hybrid lectures, discussions and workshops, somatic performances and explorations of sonic rituals and environments where sound is absent or even impossible.

Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture

Cevdet Erek

Cevdet Erek is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and musician who lives and works in Istanbul. Being interested in how sound engages with memory, he utilizes his background as an architect to create spatial, site-specific installations that often refer to historical events — such as one of his most notable works, Bergama Stereo, commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in 2019, where he reimagined the Pergamon Altar through an architectural construction augmented with an industry-standard club sound system — as well as a performance program that hosted several artists over the course of the exhibition. Cevdet’s works usually invite the audience and other artists to actively engage with both the sonic and physical environments he creates, making a bow to the communal fundament of music history — especially those types of music that heavily involve rhythm, which he understands as a trans-sensorial phenomenon that connects time with space, biology with culture.

Cevdet is also known as a performer, working with various traditional percussion and drum instruments from the region, as well as a founding member of Nekropsi — a cult Turkish experimental metal band. Currently, he is a member of the faculty at Istanbul Technical University’s Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) and the Turkish Music State Conservatory.

‍Ortalık
‍Siberian pine timber, iron, wheels, 8-channel sound (2026)

Cevdet Erek has commissioned the central piece of the exhibition, both literally and figuratively — the modular architectural and multichannel sound installation hosted in Tselinny’s largest space, named ORTA 3, where “orta” stands for “center,” “middle,” or “environment” in Kazakh. The installation will be seen in constant transfiguration over the course of the Triennale. Titled Ortalık — “immediate surroundings” or “the world around one” in Turkish — Cevdet’s work ties together several discourses universal to diverse communities worldwide, from the nomadic style of house-building, always in a state of flux, to how natural materials can transfer memory and history, especially in situations of migration, when one seemingly loses touch with one’s motherland. The artist also describes this work as an experiment in staging and in the mobility of performers and audiences, noting that one of its sources of inspiration comes from the moving platforms that connect piers and ferries in Istanbul, the city where he lives.

Being transformed from the “default” sound installation configuration to one that scatters all the modules around the exhibition space, forming “islands” that will be used as performance stages by the Triennale participants — and then putting them back together again to be organized in as jiyen, a Turkic kind of public forum for the discourse program — it will also be activated by Cevdet himself with a performance during one of the opening Rites.

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The Seeker says:

‍“One wind may lose itself within a labyrinth, and in doing so, it can confuse any traveler who seeks a path through its walls — until at last they reach its center, said to reveal every hidden truth. And yet I wonder: who decides what is center, and what is periphery? Who decides what is near, and what is far? To me, I have always stood at the center of my own universe”