Curatorial vision for Sonsbeek 2026: Memory as Living Action

For its thirteenth edition, Sonsbeek 2026 takes as its core the idea of “memory as living action.” In 1949, the municipality of Arnhem initiated the freely accessible Sonsbeek exhibition to attract visitors to a city in recovery from World War II. Seventy-five years later Sonsbeek continues to stake freedom as a horizon that can be reached through public art outside the confines of institutions. The exhibition reminds us of the possibility for renewal amid ruin, and the vital role culture plays in rebuilding a responsible, collective, and commons-driven civic life.

As curators, we are intrigued by Sonsbeek’s legacy of radical restarts and its fragile arc of survival. Each edition has redefined what art in public space can mean, reflecting shifting political and cultural conditions. For us, memory is not a matter of preservation but of transformation: a regenerative, continuous practice that shapes worldviews, constructs futures, and resists erasure. We understand our response through art as an intentional struggle against natural and social processes of forgetting.

For Sonsbeek 2026 memory is not approached as static or nostalgic, but as an unfinished, dynamic force that constantly reshapes who we are and how we live together. Remembering and forgetting are considered not as opposites, but interdependent processes that are selective, contested, and charged with power. Today, Arnhem and Park Sonsbeek remain layered sites where personal and collective histories and ecological rhythms converge. Against the backdrop of ongoing global conflict, displacement, and ecological crisis, the urgency of asking who gets to remember, and how, has only intensified.

Through approximately twenty new commissions, performances, and installations in Park Sonsbeek and at partner institutions, Sonsbeek 2026 will activate memory as a site of care, resistance, and imagination. International and Dutch artists will work in dialogue with Arnhem, its landscapes, and its communities over the exhibition’s one-hundred-day duration. Their works will offer different perspectives on memory, examining the politics of public space and symbols, the embodied and ecological dimensions of memory, and the possibility of hope in times of crisis.

This invitation to renew Sonsbeek once again is an opportunity to interrogate, stretch, and reimagine the exhibition in conversation with the pressing issues of today: war, mass displacement, techno-oversaturation and authoritarianism, socioeconomic disparity, ecological destruction, and the dissolution of shared civic values. The urgent need to resist forgetting as individuals motivated in a collective endeavour becomes more critical than ever. In shaping Sonsbeek 2026, we seek to honour the exhibition’s history while reimagining its future and create a space where memory remains alive, generative, and shared.

—Amira Gad & Christina Li, Curators of Sonsbeek 2026