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.
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 Kolmann and their project Tsiis Gers Grun. This will open on the 31st of October.
