Sonsbeek 2026 x Focus: Cultural myths

Tianyi Zheng's artist documentary Where Comes Mulan (2026), made in collaboration with Qiao Chu Guo, examines how mythical stories, and cultural and gender identities, are projected onto place — in this case, the legend of Mulan and Mula Township in the Huangpi district, Wuhan, where Mulan is said to have originated and which happens to be Zheng’s ancestral town. Beginning with intimate conversations with relatives and local residents, the film traces how Mulan has been remembered before revealing how local authorities have turned her into a powerful tourism brand. The film shifts registers when performance artist Qiao Chu Guo arrives, embodying Mulan through a queer lens.

Filmed just days after the fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024, Yara Said's The Fall of the Lion (2025) follows Saïd's first return to Syria after a decade of exile. The film questions myths of freedom and liberation in a society where patriarchy persists, and explores intuition as a survival tool for women and femme bodies living on the margins.

The evening starts with an introduction by Berber Meindertsma, curator of Darkness Reframed, Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg, the director of Sonsbeek art projects, who together will contextualize the films within the theme of ‘memory as a living action’. The screenings are followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, moderated by Berber, in which they will dive deeper into how they have used mythology to retell their own personal, as well as collective, narratives of exile and migration. 

Tianyi Zheng, Tin-e is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Hong Kong and the Netherlands. Working across moving images, installations, found objects, text, and performance, her practice explores the entangled relations between urban space, displacement, memory, and identity within globalization and diaspora. Zheng holds an MFA from the Frank Mohr Institute (2021), and has exhibited at the Simose Art Museum (Hiroshima, 2025), Art Rotterdam (2025), K11 Art Village (Wuhan, 2024), and Het Wilde Weten (Rotterdam, 2023).

Qiao Chu Guo (they/them, born in Jingmen, China, based in the Netherlands) is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, drawing, and sculpture. Their work explores the body as a medium for producing and transmitting knowledge, re-voicing bodies marginalized in the archive. Guo has had solo shows at TAC, Eindhoven and BRUTUS, Rotterdam, and is selected for the Centrale Fies fellowship 2026-2027. Group exhibitions include Framer Framed, Van Abbemuseum, Het Nieuwe Instituut, NDSM Fuse, Kunstlinie Almere, de Fabriek Eindhoven, and Moezeum. Since 2023, Guo has been part of Metro54.

Yara Said is a visual artist and writer based in the Netherlands, working across painting, sound, installation, and text through long-form research and intuitive composition. Her practice centers on a love for her people - especially womxn - and the intergenerational stories that travel with them across borders, wars, and languages. Her work has been presented online and in exhibitions and public spaces across Europe and the Middle East.

Mounira Al Solh is a visual artist who lives and works between Beirut and Zutphen, the Netherlands. Irony and self-reflectivity are central to her multidisciplinary work, which explores women’s issues, tracks patterns of micro-history, bears witness to the impact of conflict and displacement, is socially engaged, and can be political and poetically escapist all at once. She represented Lebanon at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 and her solo exhibitions have been held internationally, including most recently Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 2025; Museumsquartier Osnabrück, Germany, 2022; and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, 2022.

Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg is a curator, producer, and initiator based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and since 2023 director of Sonsbeek art projects. Gouwenberg has realized major projects with institutions such as LAS Art Foundation (Berlin), If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam), and Performa (New York). In 2022, she co-curated the Dutch Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, presenting Melanie Bonajo’s acclaimed installation When the Body Says Yes, and also served as artistic director of Jester in Genk, Belgium. 

Throughout August and September, Focus Film Theater and Sonsbeek 2026 present Darkness Reframed - eight screening programs featuring cinema classics and artist shorts at the roof top cinema and in the cinema room. With introductions and Q&As afterwards, the film program opens up the space to reflect on how Western imperialisation and its inherited forms of representation have impacted memory. Departure point for the film program is the Heart of Darkness exhibition curated by Marianne Brouwer at the Kröller-Muller museum in 1994-95, which has been a touchstone for Sonsbeek 2026. Part of the exhibition was Citizen X, a video programme curated by Corinne Diserens, which will be revisited in Darkness Reframed.