This text was updated on 16.4.2025 with information about Kristiina Koskentola’s two-day programme.
The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux is delighted to support Finnish artist Kristiina Koskentola, who is based in Amsterdam, Helsinki, and Beijing, as she presents her work in Casco Art Institute’s spring programme Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song. The programme features artistic proposals by Kristiina Koskentola, Teresa Borasino, AZ OOR, and Serena Lee.
Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song
Exhibition: 22.3.–25.5.2025
Festive opening: 22.3.2025, 15:00 with presentations
Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons
Lange Nieuwstraat 7
3512 PA Utrecht
The Netherlands
info@casco.art
www.casco.art
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The proposals presented in the exhibition and public programme Sensing the Ways inquire into situated ways of knowing that emerge through body and movement, shaped by deep connections with the land, more-than-human life worlds, and spirit.
Integrating aesthetic, poetic, archival, and performative strategies, the artists’ works invite reflection on the possibilities that arise when knowing is reconceived as an embodied practice, one that is intimate and firmly rooted in emotional and reciprocal presence. Resisting forms of rationalization, they challenge modern/colonial epistemological frameworks.
Sensing the Ways further offers a thoughtful artistic consideration of the politics of knowledge regeneration. Tending to how the addressed knowledges move and are reshaped across generations, communities, and geographies, the artists assert the vitality of alternative epistemologies in the present and the need for their ongoing renewal.
How might attuning ourselves to sensory forms of knowing—generated through touch, story, movement, and song—bring about radical transformation? What might it mean to honor the ways knowledge travels and transforms across time, space, and being?
In Sensing the Ways, each artist brings forth exhibited works and public activities, engaging with specific sites and histories:
Kristiina Koskentola presents works that channel and intertwine ancient shamanic philosophy and practice with contemporary thinking and futurist visions. Developed in collaboration with Manchu shamanic composer Han Xiaohan, the practitioners have been working together on the Finnish-Russian border, specifically in Karelia, around Lake Saimaa, and in Manchuria’s Daxinganling region along the Amur River—a natural border between China’s Northeast and Russia’s Far East. The project delves into these practices within the Taiga landscapes, reflecting on resilient, interconnected knowledges.
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Teresa Borasino carefully explores Quelccaya, the world’s largest tropical glacier, in the Peruvian Andes. Now at the risk of disappearing—along with the Indigenous communities, ancestral practices, and knowledge systems, it sustains and that sustain it—Quelccaya bears the pain of ongoing colonial violence and escalating lithium extraction. Borasino’s video installation traces the pulse of this wounded glacier as a living organism. Intertwining its presence with anti-colonial narratives, she reimagines ways of being and sensing that honor the deep interdependence between all forms of life.
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AZ OOR’s practice centers on the Amazigh movement. It proposes speculative narratives to explore and highlight the transnational networks that advocate for the cultural rights and resistance of this indigenous group. Through Issaffen n Irifi (Rivers of Thirst in Amazigh), a scenography and storytelling circle, AZ OOR confronts colonial legacies, extractivism, and environmental destruction. This cycle is part of The Fable of the Agronauts: a space tale in which the pre-colonial past becomes present and ancestral knowledge is used to imagine a liberatory post-Indigenous world from the vantage point of indigenous survivance in North Africa.
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Serena Lee opens up her artistic research on taijiquan, a martial art developed in China with both combat and health applications, as a way of thinking through moving. Transforming the space, she invites us to spend time with the questions raised through this embodied practice, within various atmospheres for collective study. Playing with invited study partners who practise in different modes, the project finds different ways to pose the question: How do we know what we know? By inhabiting this shifting constellation of materials, processes and ideas, we trace the ways that taijiquan practice might inform an ethics of knowledge production, subjectivity, and interrelationality.
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Sensing the Ways marks the beginning of Changing the Fabric of the Night Sky. Through various constellations of inherently relational practices, this multi-year initiative imagines beyond the world as we know it.
Two-day programme with Kristiina Koskentola
Camera Dialogue #2, with Gu Tao, Kristiina Koskentola, and Rick Dolphijn
What possibilities do artistic and documentary practices, as well as contemporary philosophical thought, offer for the regeneration of land-based knowledges and spiritual relationality in the present?
Join us for Camera Dialogues, a study program by Kristiina Koskentola and special guests that explores this question through screenings and dialogues.
As part of the lineage of Kristiina’s recent collaborative works, the program delves into processes of knowledge production, polyvocal subjectivity, and the agency of multiple co-actors—both human and non-human—shaping artistic and filmic imaginations. It further invites discussion on the ethics of collaboration and recording, as well as the politics of visuality.
Camera Dialogues unfolds in two parts, with the first study session taking place on April 4 and the second on April 17.
The study sessions are conceived as a space to reconsider collaborative audiovisual practices that move beyond extractive or objectifying lenses, where community members—such as storytellers and shamans—as well as other non-human entities, are not merely subjects of research but active co-creators. Each session includes a screening and presentation, followed by a Q&A and space for discussion. The program concludes with a communal dinner.
17 April, 13:30–18:30, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Lange Nieuwstraat 7, Utrecht, RSVP: info@casco.art
13:30–15:00 Walk-in and exhibition visit
15:00- 15:30 Introduction to the film by Gu Tao
15:30–16:50 Screening of Opaque God by Gu Tao
17:15–18:30 Study Session with Rick Dolphijn and Kristiina Koskentola followed by Q&A
18:30–19:30 Communal dinner and discussion
Screening: Opaque God explores profound spiritual and cultural themes, probing the boundaries between divinity and human understanding. It follows Guan Kouni, the last shaman of the Oroqen people, as she strives to preserve her ancient religious traditions. On the 1st or 15th day of the lunar calendar, Guan Kouni performs customary rituals, offering tributes to the spirit tablet and worshipping the gods in traditional ways. However, her role as a shaman was disrupted by government policies enacted after the “liberation.” Paradoxically, these same authorities later permitted her to hold a rare ceremony to pass on her shamanic identity. Despite her hopes of finding a successor to continue this sacred tradition, she faces a significant challenge: the younger generation’s diminishing belief in the gods. The Oroqen are a Tungusic people, with the largest population living in northeast China. The main belief system of the nomadic Oroqen was shamanic. In the early 1950s, the Oroqen had to leave their traditional lifestyle deep in the forests and move to settlements by order of the government.
Study Session: After the screening, philosopher Rick Dolphijn and artist Kristiina Koskentola engage in a dialogue on the philosophy of land (and hence the cosmos), on humanisms and the more-than-human worlds, embodiment, the earthliness of us, and the importance of rethinking Western philosophical paradigms alongside many other traditions of thought. They explore how shamanic and Indigenous knowledge systems challenge dualistic worldviews, offering holistic perspectives on existence, spirituality, and ecological interconnectedness.
RSVP via info@casco.art
Guided exhibition tour of Thawing of the Frozen Rivers with Kristiina Koskentola and Han Xiaohan + Live concert with Han Xiaohan
Guided tour: 18 April, 15:30–17:00 / Casco HQ, RSVP: info@casco.art.
Concert: 20:00–22:00 at De Kargadoor, Oudegracht 36, Utrecht.
We are delighted to welcome Manchu shamanic composer Han Xiaohan for a special concert as part of Sensing the Ways in Utrecht—an extraordinary moment we hope you can join and not miss.
The day’s program begins with an exhibition tour from 15:30 to 17:00, led by artist Kristiina Koskentola. Over the past few years, Kristiina and Han Xiaohan have collaborated closely, and their film installation Thawing of the Frozen Rivers, featured in the exhibition, marks the first time they present a joint work.
After the tour, take some time to enjoy food around town before we reconvene at 20:00 at De Kargadoor, a cultural venue on Oudegracht in Utrecht, for Han Xiaohan’s concert.
Since 2003, Han Xiaohan has focused on collecting, organizing, and reinterpreting the music of the Tungusic-Manchu people, his own heritage. For over two decades, he has dedicated himself to studying traditional Manchu music and recreating it based on its original structures. To research shamanic music, he visits dozens of remote villages in Northeast China and Inner Mongolia, making field recordings and practicing it in situated forms throughout the taiga landscapes. With Manchu culture and music at risk of disappearing, his work plays a vital role in preserving and regenerating these knowledges.
At the concert, Han Xiaohan invites us to experience the traditions of the Tungusic-Manchu people through his musicality, incorporating shamanic sounds—through instruments, technique, performance, and vocal chants rooted in his culture. A distinguished master of the shaman drum, he intertwines ritualistic elements with poetic songwriting, reflecting on the sacred connection between humans, spirits, and the natural worlds.
Admission to the concert is free.
Sensing the Ways is made possible by the financial support of Gemeente Utrecht, Mondriaan Fonds, DOEN Foundation via Arts Collaboratory, and Iona Foundation. In their artistic research and proposals, Teresa Borasino is supported by the European Cultural Foundation and Patagonia International Grants Program; Serena Lee by Canada Council for the Arts and Culture Moves Europe; and Kristiina Koskentola by the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux and Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
Cover image: Clockwise, from top left: scenic elements from AZ OOR’s Fable of the Agronauts, presented at Jan Van Eyck Academy, 2023; video still of a white birch forest in Hulunbuir by Kristiina Koskentola, 2025; Serena Lee, Playing the Mountain (still), 2022; Teresa Borasino, Glacial Resurgence, 2025.