Ziliä Qansurá is a Bashqort multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Vienna, exploring how Indigenous agency manifests itself as an autonomous force — in contrast to how neoliberal institutions often frame it exclusively as a response to various types of oppression.
Practicing across visual art, installation, performance, contemporary theater, and more, she often works with felt, native plants, textiles, electronic waste, etc., putting their physicality and animacy into a historical context. Ziliä juxtaposes this context with how these materials are presented today, and how they relate to the artist’s own body — or any other body that holds traces of racialization, marginalization, etc. Growing up in Bashqortostan, where she developed an attention to how space, movement, and storytelling shape experience, Ziliä uses these traces as a somatic map, and a tool for healing — a form of knowledge that brings together past and present and can inform a different, sovereign future.
Ziliä studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, as well as at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS) and Ufa College of Arts. Her works have been presented in various venues and contexts, including Berliner Festspiele, Asia Triennial Manchester, Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Arts, Kunstquartier Bethanien, and more.
