Sonsbeek 2026 x Focus: Citizen X Revisited
Sonsbeek 2026
Focus Filmtheater, Arnhem
5 August 2026,
19.00hr –
21.00hr
Inleiding
A key touchstone for Sonsbeek 2026 has been the Heart of Darkness exhibition curated by Marianne Brouwer at the Kröller-Muller museum in 1994-95. Taking its name and provocation from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, the exhibition held up a mirror to the western world, its Enlightenment ideals and forms of representation. Extending the exhibition's reach was the film programme Citizen X, curated by Corinne Diserens, which positioned artist films and videos as urgent alternatives to the relentless circulation of indifferent images that flatten thought, and commercialise everyday life.
Together with Corinne Diserens, a selection of artist films from the original Citizen X program will be revisited to open Sonsbeek 2026's film programme at Focus. Featuring works by Mona Hatoum, Janice Tanaka and Mindy Faber, these films offer deeply personal reflections on the experiences of exile, loss, estrangement and displacement - ranging from heartbreaking to humorous. Each in their own distinct way they harness the medium of film as a means of reclaiming narrative agency, recovering memories and histories long thought lost through the layering of archival imagery, music, sound and voice over. These films portray the dynamic and sometimes dizzying nature of memory: ever-shifting, passed on from generations, simultaneously shaped by and shaping us.
The program opens with an introduction by Corinne Diserens, contextualising how Citizen X came together. After the screenings, Diserens will be joined by Christina Li, co-curator of Sonsbeek 2026 for a Q&A, exploring the connection between Citizen X and Sonsbeek 2026, and how artist film offers a different grammar for thinking about narrative, images and memory.
Film makers
Mona Hatoum is a British-Palestinian artist working in video, installation, and performance. Exiled to London in 1975 after civil war broke out in Lebanon, her work engages with displacement, the body, and the politics of belonging. From 1990s onwards her early visceral video and performance pieces gave way, to large-scale installations aimed at engaging audiences in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. Hatoum’s work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, project spaces and biennials, including Documenta 14, the Marrakesh, Moscow and Sydney biennials, Tate Modern and the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Janice Tanaka is a Japanese-American media artist and professor based in Los Angeles, known for layered video works exploring Asian American identity, memory, and cultural inheritance through personal and family history. In Memories from the Department of Amnesia (1989), she weaves photographs, text, and voiceover into a lyrical meditation on her mother's life and loss. A recipient of NEA Fellowships and an AFI grant, her work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, MCA Chicago, MoMA, ICA Boston, Bonn Videonale, and the World Wide Video Festival, The Hague.
Mindy Faber is a Chicago-based media artist and educator whose work brings feminist politics and sharp humour to questions of female identity and social constraint. Delirium (1993) won the Main Prize at the Berlin Film Festival's Videofest '94. After receiving a Rockefeller Intercultural Multimedia Fellowship (1996), she began collaborating with youth on award-winning projects aired on national television. Teaching at Video Machete and Evanston Township High School, she led students in producing History Lessons, on post-9/11 immigrant backlash, which received a 2007 Peabody Award as part of Beyond Borders for The Independent Film Channel.
Speakers
Corinne Diserens is Curator/Head of the Collection of Works on Paper, Photography after 1960 and Media at Hamburger Kunsthalle. She previously held positions as curator and director at institutions including IVAM Valencia, MACBA Barcelona, Musées de Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nante, and Museion Bolzano, and served as curator of Tyne International and the Tirana, Sao Paulo and Taipei Biennales. She headed the art academies ERG, Brussels and ENSAPC, Paris-Cergy.
Christina Li is the co-curator of Sonsbeek 2026. As an international curator and writer, her context-specific practice spans visual art, performance, and moving image. She serves as artistic director of Kim Association, Singapore, and spearheaded the 2022 edition of Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time, a triennial for performance and moving image in Bangkok. Li has held director and curatorial roles at Para Site (Hong Kong), Spring Workshop (Hong Kong), SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Space (Amsterdam), and BAK – basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht).
About Darkness Reframed
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.