A major international exhibition at Park Abbey in Leuven exploring landscape as a relationship between place, introspection, and action

Threading Landscapes: Art at Park Abbey
​​24 October 2026 - 28 March 2027
​Opening: Saturday 24 October 2026
​Press preview: Thursday, 22 October 2026

Tickets
​Ticket sales start on 9 June via the Park Abbey website

​Museum PARCUM — Park Abbey
​Abdij van Park 7
​​3001 Leuven
​​Belgium

Curated by Daniel Feldman, Katya García-Antón, María Inés Rodríguez and Ana Sokoloff

Park Abbey and PARCUM present Threading Landscapes: Art at Park Abbey in Museum PARCUM. This large-scale contemporary art exhibition unfolds across the historic site of Park Abbey in Leuven, one of Europe’s most significant and best-preserved monastic heritage landscapes.

The exhibition brings together some 25 Belgian and international artists, including Leonor Antunes, Edith Dekyndt, Jenny Holzer, Meg Webster, Hana Miletić, Laure Prouvost, Cecilia Vicuña, Rossella Biscotti, Ahmed Umar and Julia Isídrez. “Through sculpture, textile works, performance, moving image, sound, ecological practices and installations, they approach the landscape not as a backdrop or representation, but as a dynamic field of relationships,” explains Alderman for Culture Bert Cornillie. “This field is shaped by memory, ritual, ecological transformation and collective life. The exhibition also marks the end of a fifteen-year restoration campaign at Park Abbey. Thanks to this extensive restoration, one of Leuven’s most significant heritage sites is once again fully accessible to the public.”

The exhibition also marks the end of a fifteen-year restoration campaign of Park Abbey, making one of Leuven’s most meaningful heritage sites fully accessible to the public. Founded in 1129, Park Abbey is one of the best-preserved abbey sites in Western Europe. On the outskirts of Leuven, surrounded by greenery, the domain — with its monastery, abbey farm, ponds and enclosing walls — forms an exceptionally intact ensemble. Its cloisters, vaulted halls and landscaped grounds offer both a tangible record of monastic discipline and a space charged with contemplative resonance.

Set within the layered architecture of the Abbey and its surrounding grounds, the exhibition activates Park Abbey as a site where historical time and contemporary artistic practice intersect. The works unfold throughout the monastery building, historical interiors, and gardens, establishing a conversation between monastic traditions of attention, repetition, and stewardship and contemporary artistic practices concerned with ecology, diaspora, material memory, and embodied knowledge.

Curatorial vision

How do we imagine the future amid political fragmentation, environmental precarity and rapidly shifting social landscapes? What forms of attention, care and collective agency are required to navigate these transformations?

Threading Landscapes explores these questions within the resonant environment of Park Abbey. Drawing inspiration from the Norbertine principles Localitas, Contemplatio and Actio, the exhibition revisits the relationship between place, introspection and action through a contemporary artistic lens, exploring how place, introspection, and action shape meaning today.

The exhibition brings together practices that engage mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual landscapes as evolving systems shaped by human and non-human forces: migration, ritual, geological time, ecological fragility, and technological mediation. Across the exhibition, materials such as thread, soil, bronze, sound, fire, water, and archival fragments become carriers of meaning, linking bodily experience to wider environmental and historical structures.

Rather than presenting a single narrative, the exhibition unfolds as a series of interconnected environments in which perception is continuously recalibrated. Visitors are invited to move, listen, and dwell within shifting spatial conditions where meaning emerges through duration, proximity, and encounter.

Through new commissions, performative interventions, and ephemeral works, the exhibition traces the rhythms of human and non-human presence across architecture and landscape.

A public program of talks, performances, and a series of connected and thought-provoking lectures and workshops will accompany the exhibition, alongside guided mediation activities that encourage immersive reflection. An accompanying publication will document the works in situ and offer scholarly and artistic perspectives on the project.

Park Abbey itself—long shaped by cycles of monastic life, agricultural cultivation, and architectural transformation—forms an active participant in the exhibition. The works do not simply occupy the site, but enter into dialogue with its material and historical layers.

List of participating artists
​(Please note that this list is not final and that further artists are yet to be confirmed)

Leonor Antunes is a Portuguese sculptor whose practice engages modernist design, craft histories, and architectural systems through suspended spatial installations.

Bianca Baldi is a South African artist working with film, installation, and archival research, often addressing colonial histories and systems of representation.

Rossella Biscotti is an Italian artist whose work spans sculpture, sound, and performance, often engaging with archival and judicial histories.

Ana María Caballero is a poet and interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores language as material and spatial form.

Carlos Casas is a filmmaker and artist working with experimental cinema, sound, and immersive installation.

Edith Dekyndt is a Belgian artist whose practice focuses on material transformation, entropy, and the invisible forces shaping matter over time. Working across installation, film, textiles, and subtle interventions, she reveals processes of change, fragility, and energy through minimal gestures. Her works invite sustained attention to duration and perception.

Jenny Holzer is a conceptual artist known for her text-based works engaging language, politics, and public space.

Julia Isídrez is a Paraguayan ceramic artist working with vernacular clay traditions rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems.

Tarik Kiswanson is a Swedish artist and writer of Palestinian origin whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and text. His work explores themes of displacement, inheritance, and transformation through forms that appear suspended or in states of becoming.

Irene Kopelman is an Argentinian artist whose drawing-based practice engages scientific observation, fieldwork, and ecological systems.

Eunjo Lee is a London-based artist working with real-time 3D simulation, game engines, and experimental animation. His practice constructs speculative digital environments that merge mythological time, ecological anxiety, and computational aesthetics into continuously evolving worlds.

Guadalupe Maravilla is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, performance, and sound, whose practice is grounded in migration, trauma, and healing. Having migrated from El Salvador as a child during the civil war, his work transforms personal history into collective ritual frameworks.

María Angélica Medina is a pioneering Colombian artist whose practice has, since the 1970s, redefined weaving as a conceptual, social, and temporal structure. Her ongoing work Pieza de conversación expands textile practice into a durational system of encounter and exchange.

Hana Miletić is an artist based in Belgium whose practice investigates systems of repair, care, and informal maintenance. Working primarily through hand-weaving, she translates overlooked gestures of mending and survival into precise material forms.

Dala Nasser is a Lebanese artist working across painting, installation, and site-responsive practice, with a focus on landscapes marked by conflict, extraction, and layered histories.

Amol Patil is a conceptual and performance artist whose practice unfolds across sculpture, installation, drawing, video, sound, and performance. Grounded in personal and collective histories, Patil’s work excavates the layered experiences of labour, migration and social marginalisation, particularly as they resonate through the hierarchies of caste and class that shaped his upbringing in Mumbai’s chawl neighbourhoods.

Laure Prouvost is a French artist based in Belgium whose immersive practice combines video, installation, sculpture, and language to create sensorial environments shaped by narrative slippage and poetic disorientation. Her work explores intimacy, translation, and perception through fluid, often humorous storytelling.

Erik Tlaseca is a Mexican artist working with installation, sculpture, and performance, drawing on Indigenous, ritual, and contemporary visual traditions.

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist whose practice spans performance, installation, and Indigenous cosmologies, particularly reactivating Andean quipu systems.

Meg Webster is an American sculptor known for her elemental installations using natural materials such as sand, wax, and earth.

Ahmed Umar is a Sudanese-born artist based in Norway whose practice engages with spirituality, diaspora, and queer identity through sculpture, performance, and installation.

* Commissioned new work for the exhibition

CURATORIAL TEAM

Daniel Feldman is an architect and urban designer focused on adaptive reuse, social infrastructure, and participatory design. Founder of ZITA and former UNDP architecture lead, his work bridges heritage, sustainability, and community-centered development.

Katya García-Antón is a curator, writer, and museum director working across ecology, Indigenous knowledge, and contemporary art. Director of the Northern Norway Art Museum and former director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, she has curated major international biennials including Venice Biennale presentations for Spain and the Nordic countries.

María Inés Rodríguez is a curator and institutional leader whose work connects contemporary art with architecture, urbanism, and scientific research. She is director of the Walter and Nicole Leblanc Foundation and founder of Tropical Papers.

Ana Sokoloff is an art advisor and curator specializing in Latin American contemporary art. Based in New York, she is founding partner of Sokoloff + Associates and co-founder of Bodega Piloto in Bogotá, with a focus on curatorial research and institutional collaboration.

Press preview

A press preview will take place on Thursday 22 October 2026 at Park Abbey, Leuven. ​

Please confirm your presence before 1 October via micha@clubparadis.be

About Park Abbey and Museum PARCUM

Park Abbey, founded in the 12th century, is one of the best-preserved abbey sites in Western Europe. On the outskirts of Leuven, surrounded by greenery, the domain — with its monastery, abbey farm, ponds and enclosing walls — forms an exceptionally intact ensemble. Since the end of the 18th century, very little has been demolished or added. This rare authenticity makes the site a unique heritage destination where 900 years of history are tangibly present.

Museum PARCUM showcases the authentic heritage of Park Abbey and takes a unique approach to religious heritage. In the museum, you can discover the abbey’s well-preserved artistic treasures, including twenty 17th-century stained glass panels in the cloister gallery and magnificent stucco ceilings in the library and refectory. The colourful stained glass windows by Jan de Caumont represent one of the most extensive collections of 17th-century painted glass in the Low Countries still in their original location. Their historical significance and exceptional craftsmanship have earned them recognition as a Flemish Masterpiece. In the refectory, library and the former private dining room of the abbot, three breathtaking stucco ceilings by 17th- century master Jan Christiaen Hansche catch the eye. His baroque scenes — including a striking Last Supper — display an unparalleled three-dimensionality. Another highlight is the 16th-century chapter house with 13th-century frescoes in the east wing.

Beyond its heritage value, Park Abbey also serves as a green lung and an official quiet zone. The surrounding natural estate of 42 hectares, with its ponds and meadows, provides a habitat for rare fauna and flora. The site forms a unique microcosm where heritage, ecology and reflection converge — just two kilometres from the centre of Leuven.

Tradition in renewal, renewal in tradition

Park Abbey is a model for how abbeys can fulfil a contemporary, sustainable role. The 12th-century heritage site lives on in its distinctive and spiritual atmosphere. Various partner organisations are housed and active in the restored outbuildings and spaces. Modern craftspeople such as the microbrewer and the miller, innovative organic farmers, researchers and social entrepreneurs all contribute to

the abbey's contemporary identity — driven by the same pioneering spirit as the Norbertines who have called this place home for centuries.

Partners on the estate include PARCUM, the museum and expertise centre for religious art and culture; the Alamire Foundation, KU Leuven's research centre for polyphonic music; the abbey brewery Braxatorium Parcensis; the volunteer association Vrienden van de Abdij (Friends of the Abbey); brasserie De Abdijmolen; ​ Kerk in Nood, and the Abdijboerderij, a collaborative urban farming initiative between BoerEnCompagnie, Landwijzer and Wonen en Werken – De Wikke. The Norbertine fathers continue to maintain the monastic tradition on the abbey site to this day.

Practical information

Threading Landscapes: Art at Park Abbey
​​24 October 2026 - 28 March 2027
​Opening: Saturday 24 October 2026
​Press preview: Thursday, 22 October 2026

Tickets
​Ticket sales start on 9 June via the Park Abbey website

​Museum PARCUM — Park Abbey
​Abdij van Park 7
​​3001 Leuven
​​Belgium

Curated by Daniel Feldman, Katya García-Antón, María Inés Rodríguez and Ana Sokoloff

Press contact
​Club Paradis
​Micha Pycke
​+32 (0)486 680 070
​micha@clubparadis.be

Selection of images

AbdijvanPark 013 ©CedricVerhelstPandgang ©CedricVerhelst Voorweb

COVER

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IMG 20260210 124744Refter Avondmaal Jef Schors

Refter Montage Jef Schors Groot Formaat