Sonsbeek 2026 will take place in Sonsbeek Park, at partner institutions, and at various locations throughout Arnhem, transforming the city into a platform for new and existing works by eighteen artists from the Netherlands and abroad. The exhibition features twelve commissioned works, including site-specific installations, sculptures, and performances that broaden our perspective on art in public spaces.

The exhibition begins with the act of looking itself: painting appears as a dynamic interplay of language, texture, scale, and spatiality. The pictorial gesture becomes one element within a broader conceptual field. Nine artist rooms function as spaces for thought, where presence and absence, surface and architecture, object and image continuously shift. Some artists start from drawing or writing, others from spatial interventions or hybrid forms that stretch the boundaries of painting. In doing so, the medium is revealed as an open, evolving visual language in which past and present mutually reinforce one another.

In Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven's collages this process is not narrated but dismantled and restaged. Images drawn from different domains, sexuality, medicine, popular culture, technical language, are brought together until they lose their apparent stability. The body does not appear as a compact unity, but as a surface traversed by forces, codes, and information that overlap and transform one another. To look at these works is to witness a mutation. The old binaries, natural and artificial, organic and mechanical, intimacy and control, gradually cease to function. What remains is an unstable field of relations, a restless surface, continuously rewritten through montage.

The fourth edition of the Biennale Matter of Art, foregrounds art that is born out of necessity and shaped by a reflexive, embodied engagement with the conditions people inhabit every day. The biennale is cocurated by Jaroslava Tomanová, Jakub Gawkowski, and František Fekete.

How can the evolution of contemporary art serve as a lens through which to understand the history of counterculture—a phenomenon that continues to influence artistic approaches today? This question serves as a guiding force behind the exhibition »Inner Mornings, or Forms of Counterculture«. Building on the ideas of Henry David Thoreau—whose poem The Inward Morning gives the exhibition its title—as well as on the writings of Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari, the concept of counterculture is understood here as active, discursive, and transformative.