The first thing Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg talks about on the bus is the traffic. I’m puzzled by what she is referring to as I look through the window. The city is tiny, and it reminds me (a bit uncannily) of The Prisoner, a British series in the 1960s in which a man seems unable to escape from a semi-luxurious captivity, a sort of proto-Truman Show. Nevertheless, traffic is apparent; there is an outside world. Drivers can turn their heads to the right and see Mounira Al Solh’s And Europa fled / En Europa sloeg op de vlucht / عندما رحلت أوروبا, bringing ancient and contemporary histories together in a single monumental figure.
Floating on the Sint Jansbeek, the sculpture of a female body rises from a murex shell, the ancient creature whose purple dye brought prosperity to Phoenician societies. The population of these creatures became heavily depleted through such exploitation. Larger than human scale, the figure carries a suitcase, a mobile phone, and an oar. A Phoenician boat rests on her head. Her body is pierced by bullets.
The sculpture connects histories of trade, extraction, migration, and displacement across thousands of years. Before our light turns green, history continues to travel, carried through movement, memory and survival.
Before any other artwork from this year’s Sonsbeek Biennial appears, there are trees, deer, municipal decisions, residents, forgotten infrastructures, anonymous posters, and countless human and more-than-human forces that have shaped Park Sonsbeek over time. Gouwenberg speaks about the surroundings as something already inhabited by its own rhythms and forms of agency. We follow those movements under a gentle summer rain, with each step thinking about the use, care, conflict, cultivation, and change that defines a park like Sonsbeek.
Listening to Gouwenberg describe the exhibition, every commission crystallizes as something entering a world already in motion. Every artist has to develop a relationship with the landscape, with Arnhem, and with the histories embedded in its ground.
This approach has been central to Gouwenberg’s trajectory as a curator and producer. Across her work in international exhibitions, institutions, and alternative spaces she has repeatedly explored how art can create conditions for encounters between different forms of knowledge, communities, and histories. Her practice has often focused on the spaces between disciplines and between people: the moments where an artwork becomes a meeting point rather than a singular statement.
At Sonsbeek 2026, this way of thinking becomes inseparable from the exhibition’s own history and the stories the invited curators carry along with them. For the thirteenth edition of Sonsbeek, Amira Gad and Christina Li formulate approaches that reflect on the contribution of art to civic life, and thus to the origins of this exhibition of art in the public space.
In 1949, Arnhem was a city rebuilding after the devastation of the Second World War. The municipality initiated Sonsbeek as a freely accessible outdoor exhibition, inviting people back into shared space at a moment when cultural infrastructures had been damaged and collective life was being reconstructed. Art offered a way to gather, to imagine renewal, and to reconnect inhabitants with the city around them.
Seventy-seven years later, Sonsbeek remains shaped by that original impulse while responding to a profoundly different landscape of crises. The exhibition emerges from a period marked by war, displacement, ecological instability, technological acceleration, and political uncertainty. Gad and Li address these tensions through the concept of memory as a living action: something continuously produced by collective attention.
The history of the Sonsbeek Biennial itself is built from repeated acts of renewal. Each edition has reconsidered what public art can mean, reflecting changing ideas of publicness, participation, and shared space. The exhibition has survived through moments of interruption and transformation, carrying a fragile yet persistent belief that culture can help shape more responsible forms of collective life.
For Gouwenberg, Gad, and Li, memory is forged through this process of becoming, with Park Sonsbeek providing the perfect terrain. Every path contains traces of another time. The Sint Jansbeek stream recalls the mills and industries that once depended on its water, connecting the park to Arnhem’s industrial history. The rhododendrons reveal the movement of plants across continents as well as the cultural histories attached to ideas of beauty, cultivation, and ownership. The park’s deer enclosure exposes the contradictions of a managed wilderness, where protection and control exist alongside the lines of a particular cultural pride. he park holds these histories in coexisting overlaps that keep shaping the present.
Fanja Bouts, Landscapes looking back: More-than-human interpretations of Park Sonsbeek, 2026 - Sonsbeek 2026. Photo: Django van Ardenne
Fanja Bouts’ Landscapes looking back: More-than-human interpretations of Park Sonsbeek (2026) begins precisely from this understanding of landscape as a living archive. Four stained-glass panels framed by engraved wood are placed at significant locations throughout the park: the Sint Jansbeek stream, the rhododendron, the beech tree, and the deer camp. Each panel invites visitors to inhabit the perspective of another presence within the landscape, encouraging attention towards forms of memory that exist beyond human experience, a point of view which interests the artist.
Bouts, who grew up in Arnhem, uses stained glass as the membrane that encompasses her memory of the city, and of her mother’s learning of this specific glass-making technique. Traditionally connected to sacred architecture, the material transforms the act of looking into something closer to contemplation. Nature becomes a subject of reverence while the work simultaneously questions how that reverence is constructed. Traditionally connected to sacred architecture, the material transforms the act of looking into something closer to contemplation. Nature becomes a subject of reverence while the work simultaneously questions how that reverence is constructed.
The material originally belonged to Bouts’ mother, who purchased it intending to use it for another project but never did. By incorporating these unfinished materials into the commission, Bouts connects individual memory with broader questions of inheritance, transmission, and unfinished possibilities. The work becomes a meeting point between generations, species, and forms of knowledge.
Loesje, I don’t need a backyard, I share a park - Sonsbeek 2026. Photo: Django van Ardenne
Nearby, Loesje’s contribution extends memory into the everyday language of the city. The Arnhem-based collective has been producing anonymous posters since 1983, creating short statements that move through public space as invitations, provocations, and reflections. Their contribution to Sonsbeek includes a mural on De Rentmeesterswoning and a timeline of posters at Arnhem’s Rembrandt Theater, tracing decades of collective writing.
I don’t need a backyard, I share a park, reads the facade of one of the historical buildings of the park, capturing the spirit of the exhibition. A “backyard”, of course, belongs to an individual and is shaped by boundaries and personal decisions. A park exists through shared presence. It is brought to life by different people carrying different memories into the same space. The phrase also reflects Loesje’s wider political history. The collective has addressed war, freedom of expression, social inequality, and political change through anonymous public writing. The absence of individual authorship allows their words to circulate as a collective voice.
During their research, the curators discovered the slogan in Loesje’s archives and later learned it had emerged from Arnhem’s pride in Park Sonsbeek itself. Bringing it back into the landscape becomes an act of continuation: a sentence produced in the city returning to the place that inspired it.
Korakrit Arunanondchai, With a history in a room filled with people with funny names 4; Will you find beauty in this sea of data? We left it behind just for you. A cloud that will rain down on your skin. And absorb into your body, 2026 - Sonsbeek 2026. Photo: Django van Ardenne
At Platform POST, memory takes another form through artists exploring how experiences are reconstructed. Korakrit Arunanondchai’s installation moves between grief, ritual, technology, and ecological transformation. Revisiting a 2017 work, the artist extends his exploration of globalization and belief systems against a landscape where human traces slowly disappear into other forms of life. A giant rat appears, for example, as a figure from a possible future, referencing the idea of a sixth global extinction in which only certain adaptable species survive. Around it, ritual objects made from banana leaves and found materials are gradually reclaimed by plants. A buried instrument vibrates beneath the installation, creating a physical sensation that moves between quiet presence and sudden disruption. The work treats memory as something that circulates through bodies and environments. Objects carry emotional histories. Landscapes absorb human actions. Forgetting becomes part of a larger process of transformation.
Forensic Architecture, Situated Testimonies, 2022 - Sonsbeek 2026. Photo: Marjon Gemmeke
Forensic Architecture’s contribution approaches memory through investigation and reconstruction. The collective, founded in 2010 and based at Goldsmiths at the University of London, develops research methods that combine architecture, technology, testimony, and material evidence. Their presentation at POST focuses on how memories of violence can be retrieved through objects, spaces, and collective testimony.
Their object library relating to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 demonstrates how fragments of debris can become witnesses. Materials are not simply passive remnants; they can participate in reconstructing histories. Through digital models and spatial analysis, Forensic Architecture develops alternative ways of understanding historical narratives that remain contested. Their investigations into colonial violence in Namibia, for instance, similarly demonstrate how memory is manifested through collective testimony. Historical understanding emerges through the integration of multiple forms of evidence.
Puppies Puppies, Please do not abbreviate or shorten this title • it is just as important as the work itself • This work is evidence • a mark • that I fought • through my expression • through my voice • through my protests • for people to acknowledge • that I am a woman • my chromosomes • my genitalia • the sex I was assigned at birth do not determine my gender • they do not make me any less of a woman • OUR EXISTENCE AS TRANS WOMEN • TRANS PEOPLE • IS NOT UP FOR DEBATE • WE SHOULD NOT BE TREATED AS LESS THAN • WE DESERVE RESPECT AND UNDERSTANDING • WE DESERVE TO HAVE HEALTHCARE • WE DESERVE TO HAVE HOUSING • WE DESERVE TO WALK OUT THE DOOR WITHOUT THE FEAR OF HARM OR DEATH • WE DESERVE TO BE OURSELVES • WE DESERVE TO LAVISH IN WHO WE ARE • and we deserve equity not just equality • I learned from my Trancestors • to not shrink in the face of violence • erasure • discrimination • for so many trans people • our starting line is not the same as our cis counterparts • this should be acknowledged and accounted for • there’s a reason we aren’t in many slightly older art history books • there’s a reason I never felt mirrored when studying art • we were never let into any of these spaces (not that long ago) • with Sylvia Rivera as my guiding light • I will demand what I deserve • I will be vocal • I won’t be stepped on • I am a Puerto Rican Japanese Indigenous Trans Woman • I am made in the image of a higher spirit/entity • my body was shaped • molded • and my existence is art • (as are the other trans people on this planet) • it’s quite frankly a miracle that I’m here today • a brain tumor survivor • a rape survivor • a survivor of all that went against me • and every obstacle • my presence • is in this sculpture • performing in my absence • I am a woman • and no one can ever take that from me (this is my body being handed over to many people • to be used • to be sold • to be exhibited • to be exchanged • and this is not lost on me • it’s a part of the work) • Hahom, 2026 - Sonsbeek 2026. Photo: Django van Ardenne
Puppies Puppies’ Hahom (2026) turns attention towards the politics of the body. Cast in bronze from a 3D scan of the artist’s body after top surgery, the sculpture continues a longstanding personal and social exploration of trans visibility. Bronze has traditionally been used by artists to preserve bodies and commemorate figures considered historically significant. Here, the sculpture carries the memory of self-definition. It insists on presence while remaining connected to transformation. The body becomes evidence, and possibility.
Alvaro Barrington, To Be Heard - Sonsbeek 2026. Photo: Django van Ardenne
Alvaro Barrington’s pavilion, To Be Heard, introduces another form of memory: memory created through attention. The structure invites visitors to sit and to listen, yet there is no programmed soundtrack. Instead, the work opens space for the sound of leaves moving in the wind, footsteps, distant sounds, and the subtle rhythms of being present. In its way, Barrington’s pavilion evokes the famous ‘dream machine’ device, a kind of modified lamp with a special rotating shade purported to evoke unique psychic states when a viewer sits in a room illuminated by it. The device, employed famously by William S. Burroughs, Kurt Cobain, and other creative luminaries, is believed to unlock forms of creativity embedded in the mind; Barrington’s pavilion, however, finds such potential latent in space itself. The pavilion is architectural and social at once: it creates shelter while encouraging awareness of the surrounding environment. Barrington suggests that listening is a way of entering into relation with the place and with others.
At Museum Arnhem, the sculptures of Esma Yiğitoğlu extend the exhibition’s exploration of memory through material transformation. Born in Zincidere, Türkiye in 1944 and later based in Rotterdam, Yiğitoğlu developed a practice shaped by Sufi philosophy, Islamic architectural forms, and Western art history. Working with paper pulp, loam, terracotta, straw, bamboo, rope, and textiles, she created forms that exist between categories: between the human and the animal, the material and the spiritual, and between past and present. Her sculptures, resembling the forms of the towering channels cicadas use to expose themselves to the world, carry cultural memory through their substances. They appear ancient and contemporary at once, as though they have travelled through multiple histories before arriving in the exhibition space.
On Kawara, Pure Consciousness, 1998-present - Sonsbeek 2026. Photo: Rozet - Marjon Gemmeke
The exhibition concludes with On Kawara’s Pure Consciousness (1998-present). Seven paintings from his Today series (1966-2013) enter kindergarten classrooms in Arnhem, where children encounter them without advance explanation. Adults are asked not to interpret the works or guide the children’s responses. The paintings present dates, simple records of existence. Removed from institutional explanation, they return to the moment before knowledge begins organizing experience. The children encounter the paintings through direct perception, before memory has accumulated its frameworks. After moving through landscapes, bodies, materials, and histories, Kawara arrives at the origin of memory itself: the moment of attention.
The kind of attention to simple presence the Today series represents functions as a kind of summation of the Sonsbeek experience. The Biennial presents works by artists deeply concerned with the dynamics and consequences of attention, what we perceive and how we perceive it. The need to “attend” in a fundamental sense may seem like a futile hope in a world overwhelmed by proliferating information and a decreasing sense of agency, but in Arnhem, in the presence of these works, it becomes possible to imagine a way back towards a sense of coherence and of agency. It is a process that begins with becoming aware of oneself and one’s place in the world. This most perilous of contemporary journeys starts from that (not so simple) point.
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- Cover Image
Mounira Al Solh, And Europa fled / En Europa sloeg op de vlucht / عندما رحلت أوروبا
2026. Sonsbeek 2026. Photo: Django van Ardenne
