Who enters Sonsbeek parkremain disoriented: what you find before your eyes is a work of art or a centuries-old tree that overlooks? That’s exactly the desired effect. Until October 11ad Arnhemin the Netherlands, the oldest public art exhibition in Europe returns with its thirteenth edition, entitled I don’t need a garden, I share a parko “I don’t need a garden, I share a park”.
Not a museum moved outside, but a park that refuses the very idea of being owned, cared for, fenced. Between monumental installations, cinema, performances and guided walks, Sonsbeek 2026 asks the visitor to do something that traditional museums rarely expect: coexist.
A park born from the ruins
Sonsbeek was born in 1949in a city that still bears the wounds of battle of Arnhemthe military operation that took place in Netherlands in September 1944 and also mentioned in the film The last bridge of 1977. In that context, the idea of returning art and people to an open space was not an aesthetic whim, but an act of civic reconstruction. Since then, the exhibition has always returned to the same symbolic place: a 19th century landscaped garden designed to look like spontaneous nature, today transformed into the stage of a much more radical question of who has the right to that space.
It’s a question that, for anyone visiting Europe, sounds surprisingly familiar. More and more often, in fact, we see how the public space risks being accessible only for a fee, while gestures that were once taken for granted, such as sitting in the shade or drinking from a fountain, are becoming more and more rare. Sonsbeek seems to answer this concern in advance, bringing the idea back to the center park as a common good, not as a luxury to be consumed.
The 2026 program
The program of this edition brings together eighteen of artists e international collectivesYes Forensic architecture a Field of MannaYes On Kawara to the local collective Readingfrom which the slogan-title was born, called to work on the memory, the landscape and the coexistence between species.
The works are not limited to the park: they also involve the city center, with partner institutions such as Arnhem Museum e Badge. Next to the exhibition runs Spiral movementsa rich public program of talks, tours and encounters with artists specially designed to be experienced several times, not exhausted in a single visit. To complete the offer, between August and September, the cinema: eight events between classics and short films by artists Focus Filmteatro.
Perhaps it is precisely a phrase from the curator Christina Li that best encapsulates the spirit of the edition: moving in space without forcing, almost as in Tai Chilearning to read instead of imposing. An image that is also useful as instructions for use, for those arriving in Arnhem as tourists: there is no mandatory pathnor a job to tick off the list. There is only one park, eighty years of history sedimented under your feet and the possibility of sharing it with someone who decides to cross in time.