Project collaborators: Misha Gusev, Ardak Mukanova, Hmot, Anuar Duisenbinov, Madina Sadybekova, Saida Suleimenova, Zhoodar Dzheenbek.  

Sound and Wind Bound in Planes Both Audible and Unseen

Ardak Mukanova and I designed the visual language for the inaugural Korkut Sound Arts Triennale. Initiated by the Tselinny Center, the international project brings together contemporary artists to explore the concept of sound through the lens of wind, land, and Central Asian desert heritage. It is a complex, multicultural event that deals simultaneously with everyday physical realities and deeply spiritual ideas.
Dedicated to sound and listening, the Triennale created 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 hosted 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 was absent or even impossible.
To produce the promotional video, we created time-lapse sequences from satellite photographs of the Karakum Desert and the mountains of southern Kazakhstan. We then played these back on a screen while filming with a phone camera, panning left and right to capture the sweeping, flowing motion of the wind across the landscape.
The website reflects the Tselinny Center's commitment to modernity, ensuring the project claims it's place in contemporary art area despite its exploration of timeless and historical subjects. It avoids traditional archival aesthetics in favor of sharp German fonts and strict grids. Within this clean editorial-like layout, Ardak's folk ornaments serve as organic elements, disrupting the rigid typography.
The decorative graphics explores one of the Triennale’s central themes—the politics and tragedy of land—through an abstract, multilayered imagery. By merging satellite photography of Southern Kazakhstan with close-up imagery of steppe flora and landscapes, the design avoids literal representation, instead inviting a contemplation of territory, ecology, and displacement.
Each artist description is followed by a small poem, laid out as a free-form formal composition. This visual style is designed to resemble the wind interacting with form, whether it's debris caught in the air, stones shaped by natural forces, or dancing leaves.
Project collaborators: Misha Gusev, Ardak Mukanova, Hmot, Anuar Duisenbinov, Madina Sadybekova, Saida Suleimenova, Zhoodar Dzheenbek.