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

Zhanna Tulendy

Zhanna Tulendy is a director, performer, the founder and artistic director of the Almaty-based physical theatre Jolda. The focus of her artistic research is corporeal memory in the context of the monomyth, where the body is understood as a carrier of cultural and archetypal experience.

She works on numerous interdisciplinary projects that combine contemporary dance, performance, and media art. Among her key works are the performance Tamyr (2025), presented at the Avignon Off Festival (France), which explores themes of identity, collective memory, and the search for roots; the performance Merger (2023), selected for the Top 50 of The Alpine Fellowship Prize (Italy); Quantum for TEDxAstana (2023), which approaches the body through the lens of quantum mechanics; Kinetica, about women mathematicians; and The Artist’s Journey: Dali (Esentai Gallery, 2024). Zhanna teaches at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and ArtLab Satbayev University.

At the end of 2025, together with sound artist Lovozero and dancer and choreographer Nurbäk Batulla, Zhanna curated a laboratory of experimental dance and sound — an intensive workshop for dancers and performers interested in working with movement, sound, voice, corporeality, sensitivity, and attention. The outcome of the laboratory is the Rite of Qūralai performance, which will be presented as part of the II Korkut Sonic Arts Triennale.

Rite of Qūralai
Performance (2026)

For Rites of the Eternal Wind, Zhanna Tulendy creates a new collective work, Rite of Qūralai, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Nurbäk Batulla and sound artist Lovozero. In Rite of Qūralai, the artists and performers engage with somatic intuition, sonic events in a winter landscape, and the aggregate states of breath, wind, and sound. They explore symbiotic connections between imagery, memory, low temperatures, and acoustic phenomena, as well as the gradient between world-states, strange codependencies, and the transformation of limitations and trials into new possibilities for vitality. One of the central images of the performance is Qūralai salqyny, a wind named after saiga calves that blows in May, a natural phenomenon symbolizing endurance and faith in life.

Rite of Qūralai will be performed twice, at the beginning and at the end of the Triennale.

The Problem Child says:
“I wonder: if there is something called a monomyth, is there a stereomyth? If we place two stereomyths against each other, would they combine into a quadromyth that assembles a spatial archetype — or would they fall out of phase and, in destroying each other’s timbral qualities, merge back into mono? My myth is moñ, not mono — and it is written not in gold, but in blood.”