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

Şüräle

Biography

‍In Tatar and Bashqort mythologies, şüräle/shurale is a forest spirit, or a demon-like creature living deep in the woods, sometimes representing the wildness of nature and the unknown, pre-modern world that resists control and modern rationality.

Choosing Şüräle as his artist name, and often referring to himself as a “forgotten and distorted echo of the Ural forests,” the Bashqortostan-born, Almaty-based sound artist, musician, DJ, and producer Airat Khaziev situates his work in what is thought to be a chasm between digital technologies and natural, organic musical forms. Where one hears nothing but noise and chaos, Airat seeks patterns and balance; where one sees decay, he finds rebirth. Working with synthesis, machine learning, field recordings, and traditional instruments, he creates his very own auditory universe — a living, self-reproducing, and dynamic sonic space, informed by anything and everything from computer and experimental music to wind, water, plants, trees, and mountains — and, of course, the ghosts and spirits that inhabit them.

For his performances, both in solo appearances and collaborations, Airat often uses electric guitar with non-Western tuning systems, such as Arabic maqamat, and generative algorithms. He is a resident of ŞU ŞAŞU, Almaty’s renowned experimental music and sound art event series, and an alumnus of Resynthesising the Traditional, the artistic research lab hosted by Berlin’s CTM Festival.

Rites of Eternal Wind will introduce Şüräle in two instances: first, as part of an ongoing, work–in–progress collaboration with Bilawa Ade Respati and Karina Utomo, co-commissioned by Tselinny and the CTM Festival and supported by the Goethe-Institut Kazakhstan; and then during a presentation of his soundwalk in the Triennale’s special program.

If the Soil Can't Pull You In...
‍Soundwalk (2026)

Şüräle’s commissioned work for the soundwalks program is meant to trace invisible connections between people in search of a new home. Its title refers to a Bashqort saying: Yer tartmaha, hıw tarta (“If the soil can’t pull you in, the water will”), though in a somewhat fragmented way. For him, the familiar and often overused concept of tamır (root) loses its default shape as a tree growing from a single point. Instead, Airat envisions this “tree” through the lens of global entanglements — it emerges in multiple places at once, stretching its branches across time and distance in an attempt to unify different realities and create a sonic archive in which different aggregate states of memory are inscribed.

His soundwalk is a chronicle of multiple spaces and multiple attempts to find belonging. He shapes the work as a mycelium-like yäyläw (nomadic encampment), where sounds of different landscapes intertwine. For this, Airat invites friends and colleagues who share similar experiences of non/belonging: Triennale participants Azadbek Bekchanov and Bilawa Ade Respati, as well as his fellow Resynthesising the Traditional lab alumni Jena Jang and Bruno Trochmann. The sounds they contribute are woven together with Şüräle’s sonic representations of soil — as a dense, uninterrupted droning resonance of something that has never been left behind — and wind — as a movement carrying the noises of new spaces emerging along the way.
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The Whisperer says:

‍“Tired, exhausted, I asked the Earth for permission: Its merciful soil I touched. So that shaytan would not cast the evil eye, I will not offend Mother Earth. Go away, illness, go away, Here, take this stone.”