Field Trip is a live exhibition by Korean British artist Bob Kil and Danish artist Nina Beier. Conceived as an orchestrated collision between Beier’s sculpture and Kil’s performance, Field Trip merges organic objects and moving bodies, turning the entire exhibition space into a living, breathing entity.

Upon entering Beier’s sprawling sculptural installation Field, visitors are met with 6,000 flowers planted in fake terracotta pots. The repetitive arrangement in meticulous rows with defined pathways gives the sense of wandering into a digital realm of infinite loops and depth. But this isn’t a digital landscape – it is grounded in a tangible reality that echoes the cultivation of fields, each crop a clone of its neighbor, indistinguishable from the next. Kil’s performance Trip takes place every hour. The performers traverse the pathways, carrying out synchronized, choreographed gestures — dragging their feet, marching in unison, pausing abruptly.

The synchronicity of the gestures and the repetitive visual stimulation through the manipulation of multiple bodies is set in dialogue with the repetitiveness of the field providing a fluid, rhythmic counterpoint to the stasis of the potted flowers. Yet, as time elapses, Field slowly transforms. What begins as vibrant blossoms eventually wilt, shifting the dynamics between permanent sculpture and transient performance.

The titles, Field and Trip hold significance beyond their apparent meanings. While Field evokes the laborious monotony of industrialized agriculture, Trip alludes to journeys and altered states of consciousness. Together, they forge an excursion along the crossroads of work and leisure, singularity and community, dynamism and inertia.

*Performances will start at 25 minutes past the hour. Please note that the performance times may vary depending on the circumstances.
*Performances will be held from 15:00–22:00 on September 7 (Thu) due to Frieze Seoul’s Samcheong Night.

About the Artists

Bob Kil
b. 1975 in Seoul, Korea, Lives and works in Berlin

Nina Beier
b. 1975 in Aarhus, Denmark, Lives and works in Copenhagen

Alongside their individual practices, Bob Kil and Nina Beier fuse their sculptures and performances together in sculptural presences oscillating between the static and the living. Digging into cultural codes of both objects and behavior, Kil and Beier’s works explore implicit economical and interpersonal power structures. In their collaborative work, sculptural elements and the bodies present within them enter into a symbiosis and the immobile and animated elements seem to merge into one. Kil and Beier previously presented collaborative works at various institutions such as Pinacoteca Agnelli (Turin 2022), Busan Biennale (Busan 2022), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, 2022), Thorvaldsen Museum (Copenhagen, 2021), Pogo Bar, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2019) and upcoming at Haus am Waldsee (Berlin 2023) and Mudam (Luxembourg 2024).