Stas Shärifullá

Biography
Born and raised in Eastern Siberia, with Bashqort ancestry, Stas Shärifullá lives and works in Basel. Moving between academic research, performance, composition, installation, and instrument-building, his practice explores how settler colonialism shapes the material conditions of listening and sounding, with a particular focus on oral traditions in North and Central Asian nomadic cultures.

His recent work has been presented at the 2nd Ulaanbaatar Biennale, Regionale 27 at Kunsthalle Basel, The Kyiv Biennial 2026, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne, and in a collaborative programme by Kunsthalle Glarus and Haus für Kunst Uri, among others.

Residency project
During his residency at La Becque, Stas Shärifullá will explore the making of taştawıq (literally “stone hens”), clay flutes and whistles of various shapes and sizes, known by different names across the nomadic cultures of North and Central Asia. Approaching ceramics without prior experience, he draws on the structure of regional toy whistles and, most notably, on vessel flutes discovered in 1971 during archaeological excavations of the ancient city of Otrar/Farab. The process of trial and error becomes a méthode expérimentale for exploring the materiality of sound — not from the perspective of a ceramist, but of a musician, performer, and researcher informed by the historical and sociopolitical functions of oral traditions, where music is not merely a performance but a communal necessity.