ARNHEM.- Sonsbeek 2026 is moving into its final weeks with a fall program that extends the exhibition beyond artworks in the park and into conversations, screenings, performances and shared acts of remembering.
The latest edition of the long-running Dutch art event, titled Ik hoef geen tuin, ik deel een park (I don't need a backyard, I share a park), unfolds over one hundred days and closes on October 11. Curated by Amira Gad and Christina Li, the exhibition was conceived from the beginning as something that would change over time rather than remain fixed.
“We imagined Sonsbeek 2026 as an exhibition that would grow through time,” the curators said. “The autumn program continues this movement, opening memory as a collective practice through which we remember the past and imagine possible futures.”
That idea runs through the public program, Spiral Movements, developed with the Hartwig Art Foundation, Radboud University and Rozet. Instead of treating the exhibition as something to simply walk through and observe, the program invites audiences into Artist Spotlight talks and walks, weekly guided tours, film screenings, listening sessions, workshops and performances centered on memory, public space and shared futures.
One of the season’s main events is The Curved Times of Memory (What Would I Do in Orbit?), a two-day collaboration between Sonsbeek and the Hartwig Art Foundation taking place September 5 and 6 in Amsterdam and Arnhem.
The program grows out of a film series at Hartwig Proxy featuring Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Larry Achiampong and Jota Mombaa. On September 5, Hartwig Proxy will host a writing workshop by Loesje as well as a choir workshop led by Mombaa and Fieke Westland.
A day later, the program travels east. A bus will carry participants from Amsterdam to Arnhem for visits to Park Sonsbeek and partner institutions. The day includes an Artist Spotlight conversation and poster launch with Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, followed by a performance by Jota Mombaa and the ArtEZ choir.
Memory takes on a more explicitly political dimension the following week.
On September 10, partner institution POST will host the Dutch premiere of The Last Responders, the latest film by Forensic Architecture and Earshot. The screening will be introduced by Forensic Architecture advanced researcher Elliot Bourne, who worked on the film, and will be followed by a Q&A.
The next day, Radboud University and Sonsbeek art projects will present the symposium Sites of Memory in partnership with Rozet. The gathering asks how remembering can become a form of resistance to erasure and a way of imagining other futures.
Artists and researchers, including Forensic Architecture and Femke Herregraven, will address the ways memory can respond to colonial, ecological and gendered violence. The program will also include a screening of Jumana Manna’s 2013 film A Sketch of Manners.
For Sonsbeek, the emphasis on memory is not limited to looking backward. It is also tied to how public spaces are used, cared for and passed on.
That idea will become particularly tangible on the exhibition’s final day, October 11.
The finissage begins with an Artist Spotlight Talk by Larry Achiampong at Museum Bronbeek before moving toward a closing gathering titled Spiraling Out, centered on Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven’s Mystic Hexagram flower carpet.
After being cared for throughout the exhibition by volunteers, gardeners and local residents, the plants will be given to visitors to take home.
It is a simple gesture, but one that neatly captures the thinking behind this edition of Sonsbeek: an artwork does not necessarily end when an exhibition closes. It can be redistributed, remembered and allowed to continue somewhere else.
The act also turns the exhibition’s themes of growth, decay and collective care into something physical. After one hundred days in the park, fragments of Sonsbeek 2026 will literally leave with its audience.
This year’s participant list includes Larry Achiampong, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Alvaro Barrington, Forensic Architecture, Femke Herregraven, Afaina de Jong, On Kawara, Loesje, Jumana Manna, Jota Mombaa, nasa4nasa, Ipeh Nur, Puppies Puppies, Sahej Rahal, Mounira Al Solh, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven and Esma Yiğitoğlu, among others. A number of the artists have created new commissions specifically for the 2026 edition.
Ik hoef geen tuin, ik deel een park is curated by Amira Gad and Christina Li, assisted by Berber Meindertsma, and commissioned by Sonsbeek art projects director Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg.
As the exhibition enters autumn, its closing chapter appears less interested in summing things up than in keeping them moving — through people, conversations and, eventually, plants carried out of the park and into new homes.
