"Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears" Pauline Oliveros

Artist Statement
Ienke Kastelein is an interdisciplinary artist interested in perception and the senses. She is engaged in context and habitat. Hence walking and sitting have become essential research methods as well as performance practices. Public space and interior space are conceived as the studio or the stage. Walking is approached as a performance in which participants are the audience.
Her approach can be perceived as scenography or dramaturgy of space. She embraces the lightness of play. Her whole body of work is a research and a reflection on being present and presence itself.

Bio
Ienke Kastelein holds a BA in History of Art (Utrecht University) and studied photography. Next to her art practice she is an experienced teacher in art and photography, and a guest lecturer at Master in Education ARTeZ, Pécs University Faculty of Art, Winterlab ARTeZ and Dropping Summerlab at ARTeZ (on walking and performance). She is teaching sensorial and performative walking practices at Master of Scenography (Utrecht NL), Minor creative design HKU (Utrecht NL), Master CorpoReal at ARTEZ Academy (Zwolle, NL) , Art Academy Minerva (Groningen, NL), and at Master of Fine Arts with Expodium at MaHKU (Utrecht, NL ). In 2013 she was awarded the Boellaard prize. She lives and works in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

During a residency in ‘het Vijfde Seizoen’ at a Psychiatric Hospital in Den Dolder (NL) she worked on the relation between clients and their habitat, on sitting and being. In 2014 she participated in AiOP FREE! 2014 in New York with the participatory performance Have a seat on the sidewalk. In May 2014 she created the walk Very Very Slow in the footsteps of Ursula for New Habits at CasCo Utrecht (NL). She participated in the Unnoticed Art Festival 2014 and 2016 (NL). Her walking practice Walking with chairs has been performed internationally in New York, Maastricht, Oslo, Pécs and in the symposium Made of Walking curated by Geert Vermeire in Delphi. It was part of Walking, a program by Lydia Matthews at Parsons, Fine Art, New York. In 2016 she participated in the exhibition Hacking Habitat Utrecht NL. She contributed to the book Unmaking or How to rethink Urban Narratives 2016 a project of Expodium, Utrecht NL. During a residency she developed Tholos in Pécsbagota, a project on connecting memory, place and people in a rural community in Hungary. She participated in AiOP PLAY 2016 in Orlando, Florida with Dancing with chairs and Metamorphosis #1 in Athens with the performance practice H EAR T HERE. In 2017 she developed and performed Walking on Waves, a participative walk on the plaza “de Blauwe Golven”, a famous design by dutch artist Peter Struyken in Arnhem. In 2018 she started the ongoing project ‘Walking in Resonance’ and in 2019 she started to work on the performance ‘Doing Nothing’ and ‘Walking HUIS’.
She participated in Made of Walking V in Prespes with Walking borders, crossing lines, was part of ‘Making Futures School’ in Haus der Statistik with RAUMLABOR in Berlin, participated in Soundwalk Sunday with ‘Listen to Space / Alexanderplatz’ and performed Walk of a Lifetime during AiOP 2019 in New York.Her work To be Tree was performed during the Urban Tree Festival 2020. For Drifting Bodies / Fluent Spaces 2020 she created the hybrid walk Walking Water simultaneously online and in Guimaraes (with Manuela Ferreira). For Museum IJsselstein (NL) she curated three site specific walks – with Hans van Lunteren, Nikos Doulos en Wim van Sijl - and a workshop sensorial walking (2020).