Sonsbeek 2026 x Focus: Memories talking back

Using the narrative style of instructional videos typical of the 1930s and 40s, Wu Chi-Yu’s Useful Cinema (2025) explores how plantation histories across Southeast Asia relate to the current state of cinema and AI-generated film footage. It allows for the material of film to speak for itself, asking what memories are pressed in and out of its materiality? 

Elia Nurvista’s Plantation Tragedy (2026) is a fiction film that brings together historical, fictional, and contemporary figures in a dream-like world haunted by colonial histories and extractive economies. Through surreal scenes such as plants going on strike, the film provokes how future memories continue to inhabit bodies, landscapes, and everyday life. 

From Indonesia we travel to Northern England and Jamaica, where Hope Strickland’s a river holds a perfect memory (2025) unfolds. These distant communities share similar histories of manipulation and oppression whose record is kept in the living memory of its waterways. The evening closes with Noor Abed’s A Night We Held in Between (2025), offering a meditation on what memories are remembered, forgotten or lost within landscapes - and how they can resurface through gestures or rituals. 

The evening opens with an introduction by Berber Meindertsma, the Darkness Reframed’s curator, situating the four films within Sonsbeek 2026’s theme ‘memory as a living action’.

Working primarily with moving image and installation, Wu Chi-Yu investigates how technology constructs civilization, exploring lost and unestablished connections between humanity and the environment. Responding to Asia's colonial and geopolitical histories, he treats moving image as a method for re-editing history. His work has been shown at the Thailand Biennale, Taiwan Biennial, TKG+, Times Museum, MOCA Taipei, Shanghai Biennale, Taipei Biennial, EXiS, and ARKIPEL. A former Rijksakademie resident (2014–2015) and BISFF Jury Special Prize winner (2017), he co-founded the Pailang Museum, a mobile museum for decolonial moving-image studies.

Elia Nurvista explores a wide range of art mediums with an interdisciplinary approach and often intersects with politics of food. In 2015 she initiated Bakudapan, a food study group, with colleagues from various disciplines. She is also part of Struggles for Sovereignty, the solidarity platform on Land, Water, Farming, Food which aim to build lasting solidarity between groups in Indonesia and trans-national who are engaged with struggles for the right to self-determination over the basic resources that our individual and collective bodies need. Nurvista has participated in several exhibitions including Sharjah Biennial 15 in Sharjah (2023), Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka (2020) and Karachi Biennale in Karachi (2019) among others.

Hope Pearl Strickland is an artist-filmmaker from Manchester, UK, working with experimental and documentary-based modes. Their work wrestles with the choices undertaken when we visualise racialised violence, attempting to ask how we might live in a world and relate to one another with care whilst amongst and against systems of power and control. Hope’s work has screened internationally at film festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2025), the BFI London Film Festival (2022) and the 59th New York Film Festival (2021). Currently she is completing a Practice-based PhD in Film at The University of Westminster with a Quintin Hogg Trust Scholarship.

Noor Abed is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice examines notions of choreography and the imaginary relationship of individuals, creating situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed.In 2020, she co-founded the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective. Abed was assistant curator for documenta 15 and an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie. She received the Han Nefkens Foundation / Museu Tàpies Film Production Grant in 2022, and her film A Night We Held Between won first prize at the e-flux Film Award in 2024. 

Berber Meindertsma is the assistant curator of Sonsbeek 2026. After completing a master’s degree at Goldsmiths, University College London, and working at the Serpentine Galleries and the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in London, she is now an Amsterdam-based curator and writer specialising in contemporary art. From 2019 to 2024, she was part of the core team at Het HEM in Zaandam, where she contributed to the development of site-specific art commissions, collaborative projects and the digital editorial and artistic platform The Couch. In 2026, she co-curated the exhibition Currents 12: Camping Out with Maia Kenney at Jester in Genk, Belgium.