Historic Netherlands Festival Announces 100-Day Public Art Programme
Sonsbeek returns to Arnhem for the first time since its tumultuous 2020 edition. Save to My OculaSonsbeek, widely considered to be the oldest large-scale public art exhibition in Europe, has today announced the roster for its 2026 edition.
The Netherlands-based festival, which was founded in 1949, will bring together site-specific installations, performances, and sculptural interventions in Park Sonsbeek, and in partner institutions and public spaces across the city of Arnhem.
Organised around the theme Memory as Living Action, the 100-day exhibition will feature 18 artists and 12 new commissions. Its curators, Amira Gad and Christina Li, hope it will explore ‘memory as generative action rather than representation’ and ‘engage the park as a site of contested memories’, reflecting the city’s layered histories shaped by postwar reconstruction.
This year’s festival is the first since its 2020 iteration, titled Force Times Distance: On Labour and Its Sonic Ecologies. Planned to span 2020–2024, the show was first delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic until 2021, then mired by controversy when its curators resigned en masse the following year, citing ‘precarious and ultimately unbearable’ working conditions.
The 2026 lineup spans media and geographies, translating primarily studio-based practices into public commissions. New York-based Korakrit Arunanondchai and Puppies Puppies are known for their respective performance-inflected works which engage with pop culture critique, while London painter Alvaro Barrington employs a multimedia approach to image-making.
Other ephemeral practices include those of Cairo-based dance collective nasa4nasa. Co-founded by Noura Seif Hassanein and Salma AbdelSalam, their work Promises stages two dancing bodies tracing symmetrical patterns as a mode of proximity.
Meanwhile Arnhem’s veteran collective Loesje, founded in 1983 as a free speech organisation, will present street poster interventions that connect their cosmopolitan members in public space.
Other local Dutch voices include Fanja Bouts, Femke Herregraven and architect Afaina de Jong, who will appear alongside international names including Larry Achiampong, Jota Mombaça, Sahej Rahal, Mounira Al Solh and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven.
New commissions will be presented alongside permanent works from past editions, spanning 1949 to 2021, which remain in Park Sonsbeek and surrounding areas, allowing visitors to experience the exhibition as a dialogue across decades of site specific and public art experimentation. —[O]
Main image: Park Sonsbeek, 2025. Sonsbeek art projects.
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