Sophie Krier (1976, Belgium) is an artist and researcher. Through her work, she enters into dialogue with the history, stories, and living beings connected to a specific place. Descending from tailors and teachers with a farming background based in Luxemburg and Belgium, her practice alternates between long periods of fieldwork with local communities, and editorial work.
“My work is about mending relationships between beings and places. As an artist and researcher, I interweave histories, imaginaries, and embodied experiences – as an educator and editor I share and publish these processes.”
Part of Sophie’s practice is shaped around ‘outdoor schools’, where she engages with communities in speculative learning programs about the relationship between humans and nature. What these programs have in common is their exploration of different forms of presence, through accessible exercises that allow participants to practice paying attention to, and attuning to, a particular ancestral gesture, such as weaving, sowing, kneading, dreaming, remembering, erecting, and moving a fence; among others.
Alternative spaces of learning conceived by Krier over the years include: Field Essays, a series of books and conversations initiated in 2008 envisioned as listening pauses between practitioners and thinkers across disciplines; School of Verticality (2018-ongoing), a program focussing on ‘acupuncture of place’ developed in the context of a research residency hosted by Lungomare, South Tyrol; a series of site-specific outdoor classrooms for soil-based learning (Hunnie Field Classroom, 2012-2013 and Metamorfose Lokaal, 2017, with Henriëtte Waal; the summer school How to Think Like a Mountain, 2016; Garden of Moving Times, 2024, with Daniela Brasil); and the podcast series and exhibition In Search of the Pluriverse (2020-ongoing) commissioned by the Travelling Academy of Nieuwe Instituut and co-curated with Erik Wong.
She has developed and led two curricula: Designlab at Rietveld Academy (2005-2009) and Art & Design Practice track at the Liberal Arts & Sciences University College Roosevelt (2017-2022). Between 2017 and 2023 she was a fellow researcher at Plateforme Art, design et société at EnsadLab, the research laboratory of École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Over the last four years Krier trained in Equine Facilitated Learning. She currently runs her coaching practice Learning with Horses alongside her artistic practice.
VHDG Lokaal #1: Sophie Krier
Starting this January we welcome artist and researcher Sophie Krier into the AiR (artist-in-residence) to kick off her year-long art project under the flag of VHDG Lokaal. Under the title Hyndertiid, Sophie’s research will center around the role of the Frisian horse in the wider context of horse culture in Europe and Central Asia, and the horse-human relationship from its beginnings. This project consists of artistic research, art activities, and a closing exhibition in the fall of 2025.
VHDG Lokaal
From 2025 onwards, our artist-in-residence program will take a new direction under the name VHDG Lokaal. This refreshed approach focuses on artists, duos, and collectives collaborating closely with local communities. By emphasizing embedded practices, we aim to nurture process-oriented projects over a longer timeframe, filled with special art workshops, exhibitions, and other activities.
Artists will now be engaged for a full year, giving them more time to build meaningful connections with their environment and its people. We believe this extended commitment will not only enhance the quality of the work but also foster stronger, more reciprocal relationships.
In this new model, artistic research, production, public participation, and presentations will all hold equal importance, creating a more inclusive and collaborative creative process.
Hyndertiid (horse time)
During her residency period, Krier will focus on the role of the Frisian horse in the socio-cultural imaginary of Fryslân. What does this horse represent to locals, and what attracts them to this animal? Where are horse communities based, who belongs to them, and who is excluded? How do they organize themselves and does ‘mienskip’ (a local term for the commons ) play a role in their day-to-day activities? How do myths, scientific data, and histories around the (Frisian) horse influence the popular and political imagination of the region today? And which kinds of futures can we envision together, that integrate learnings from how horses deal with (presence and) time? And which plural futures can we envision, that integrate learnings from how horses deal with time? Parallel to the above fieldwork, Krier plans to co-hold horse-facilitated learning sessions with a diverse group of school students and adults.
Within the context of her ongoing project School of Verticality (2018 – present), a nomadic art program, she will do this through the lens of verticality; understood as a vector of depth and presence – against the modern assumption of verticality as an axis of power and hierarchy: verticality as both being present to, and making present what is alive, here and now.
How it comes together
Sophie processes what emerges during her fieldwork through somatic grounding practices, such as creating drawings of “inner images” — impressions left in her body and mind by encounters and conversations. These visual marks serve as the foundation for a new (horse) blanket or weave, for which Sophie wants to look into possible collaborations with local textile artisans, and -amateurs for this. Insights from her research will also be included in a publication titled Being Horse.
Over the past two weeks, Sophie started tracing the contours of the Frisian horse world by attending the popular, yearly Hengstenkeuring (stallion show) and related clinics on the health challenges and esthetic stakes of breeding with a closed studbook; by collecting the testimonial of private horse owners and getting in touch with a mare and stallion breeder, a birth supervisor, an inspector, a sport physiologist, one of the founders of the Frisian horse calendar, an equestrian law specialist, a horse show rider, a coach who made a horse drum, a historian focusing on early Frisian animal mythology and death rituals….
Every year is eventful for the Frisian horse, but 2025 is even more so. The Friesian Agricultural Museum will open a new wing dedicated to the World of the Frisian Horse this spring. And open-air horse theater It Hynder Fan Harich will première in early September. Sophie’s research positions itself in the margins of the spectacle, as ‘slow cultural work’ (AnnaLee Davis), inviting introspection and shared reflection with dedicated publics.
This summer , she will participate in a VHDG group exhibition that takes place in the context of Arcadia’s Paradys in Leeuwarden, curated by Hans den Hartog Jager. For this first public presentation, Sophie will co-curate work by artists and filmmakers who work with the figure of the horse (names tbc). The works will be activated through a roundtable, a screening, and a series of educational workshops.
The art project Hyndertiid, will conclude in an exhibition in VHDG’s new art space in the city centre, together with other VHDG Lokaal participants Suzanne Bernhardt and Phillip Kohlmann and their project Tsiis Gers Grun. This will open on the 31st of October.
