Curatorial Introduction to the Title of Sonsbeek 2026

The 13th edition of Sonsbeek takes its title from a 2010 poster by the Arnhem-based collective and edition participant, Loesje: Ik hoef geen tuin, ik deel een park (I don’t need a backyard, I share a park). This slogan proposes a shift from ownership to access, from enclosure to openness, from the private sphere to the commons. It reframes how space is inhabited — as something to negotiate rather than to possess.
 

Loesje’s slogans emerge through collective discussion and consensus where no single member is the author. The phrases are shaped in dialogue, refined through exchange, and released without attribution. In choosing this line as its title, Sonsbeek 2026 aligns itself with a process rather than a proclamation — with a way of thinking that is plural, situated and civic. The exhibition embraces the idea that meaning is formed between people.
 

Just as the park is not neutral, memory is not neutral either. They are creations of our infrastructures, be they political or social or cultural, determining what is remembered and what is left out. And so the park, through this edition, becomes the platform where this becomes undone and where the mechanisms of memory are exposed and re-engineered.
 

As such, memory is approached as a living action — unstable, incomplete, and continuously reworked. The artists in Sonsbeek 2026 are connected by a shared conviction that memory is produced through speaking and listening, assembling and contesting, as the lived practice of coexistence that is anything but passive. Released into the common space of this park, where memory becomes the material through which we orient ourselves, we might contest inherited narratives and make the conditions for a shared future. The exhibition asks its visitors to recognize themselves as being part of what memory is still in the process of making, instead of looking back over what has passed—to wander in, linger, carry something forward. The park is the journey. The rest is held in common.
 

Amira Gad and Christina Li, co-curators Sonsbeek 2026