Large-scale art exhibition Threading Landscapes brings together 24 artists at Park Abbey

Threading Landscapes marks a new chapter for the fully restored abbey in Leuven, bringing together works by contemporary artists who explore the spirit of the site.

After fifteen years of restoration, the historic monastic complex of Park Abbey in Leuven is opening fully to the public for the first time. Museum PARCUM marks this exceptional moment with Threading Landscapes: Art at Park Abbey, an ambitious exhibition featuring work by 24 contemporary artists from around the world. Nine artists have developed new projects in direct response to the abbey, its architecture, landscape, biodiversity, archives and history.

This moment represents more than the completion of a restoration. It marks the beginning of a new phase. Heritage, after all, is not static, but an ongoing process of interpretation, care and meaning-making. How do we relate today to a place that carries almost nine centuries of history, while at the same time inviting us to shape its future?

Museum PARCUM places this question at the heart of its work. The museum opens up the abbey’s exceptional religious heritage while using it as a starting point for exploring and questioning contemporary societal issues.

Genius loci: the spirit of a place

The exhibition Threading Landscapes, curated by Daniel Feldman, Katya García-Antón, María Inés Rodríguez and Ana Sokoloff, marks the first major milestone in this new phase.

The curatorial team brings together artists from around the world in Leuven to explore the specific genius loci — the spirit of the place — of Park Abbey and to question what it might mean in the 21st century.

This genius loci resides not only in the architecture. It emerges from the accumulation of lives, landscapes and practices: the Norbertine community, daily work, the ponds and fields, the park and gardens, the visitors, but also the centuries-old manuscripts, maps, liturgical books and administrative documents preserved at the abbey.

The abbey is distinguished by its exceptional authenticity. Since the construction of its 67-metre-high church tower in 1729, hardly anything has been added to or removed from the complex. The monastery lies at the heart of a 42-hectare green oasis in the Molenbeek valley, with ponds, meadows, woodland, gardens and tree-lined avenues. Culture, spirituality, architecture and nature form a remarkable whole.

It is precisely this layered character that forms the starting point for Threading Landscapes.

Landscape as a living network

The exhibition understands landscape not as scenery, territory or background, but as something continuously shaped through encounters and relationships: between ecology and cultural memory, scientific research and artistic practice, ritual and daily life, contemplation and action.

The title therefore refers less to a place than to an action. Threading becomes a way of paying attention to the visible and invisible connections through which worlds are continually made and remade.

This idea closely reflects the history of Park Abbey. For centuries, life there was guided by three Norbertine principles: Contemplatio, Localitas and Actio — reflection, attentiveness to place and action.

In an increasingly complex and unpredictable world, faced with challenges relating to ecology, polarisation, loneliness and technology, these concepts take on renewed relevance. Community-building, local connection, contemplation, spirituality and care for one’s surroundings are not nostalgic values, but potential tools for thinking about contemporary forms of living together.

Threading Landscapes invites artists and visitors to explore the abbey’s layered history, its visible traces and spiritual traditions. Their work touches on ecological awareness, cultural memory, social structures, the transmission of knowledge, migration, labour, spirituality and care.

The exhibition deliberately avoids seeking a universal narrative. By bringing together artists from widely differing geographical, cultural and artistic backgrounds, it creates space for different ways of knowing and seeing. Scientific research, artistic practice, spiritual traditions, embodied knowledge and historical memory do not need to be reduced to a single language. Their strength lies precisely in their differences and in the relationships that can emerge between them.

Together, the 24 artists reveal just how broadly ‘landscape’ can be understood: as nature and architecture, but also as body, archive, language, labour, spirituality, technology, memory and community.

“Threading Landscapes does not approach landscape as something we observe from a distance, but as something of which we ourselves are part. A place is continually remade through the relationships between people, other forms of life, architecture, history and memory. The exhibition therefore asks not only which worlds we have inherited, but above all which ones we ourselves want to continue threading.”
— Daniel Feldman, Katya García-Antón, María Inés Rodríguez and Ana Sokoloff, curatorial team of the exhibition

Nine new projects developed from Park Abbey

For nine artists, the site, its archives and its landscape provide the direct starting point for new work.

Gabriela Albergaria creates Care as a Fundamental Right (2026), a living installation made from branches, trunks, mosses, leaves, soil and plants gathered on the grounds. Growth, decay, fungi and insects will continue to transform the artwork throughout the exhibition.
In the historic library, Leonor Antunes develops a new installation that takes the architecture, the seventeenth-century stucco ceiling and the archives as its starting point. Craftsmanship, the transmission of knowledge and often invisible labour are central to the work. A concert featuring music by Éliane Radigue will later activate the work through sound.
In Concerning Unknown Women (2026), Ana María Caballero revisits poems from Park Abbey’s archives that commemorated women entering religious life, flattening individual lives into prescribed ideals of devotion and renunciation. Through imagined portraiture and her own poetry, Caballero gives these women a semblance of self, presenting them within a speculative museum website that considers how representations enter the historical record and the canon.
Tarik Kiswanson is developing a pneumatic sculpture for the historic refectory that slowly inflates and deflates like a breathing body. The work is inspired by the parachutes used to drop Steinway pianos to soldiers during the Second World War and connects vulnerability, conflict, music and the possibility of a new beginning.
Irene Kopelman works from the biodiversity of the abbey site. Together with scientists, she studies moths recorded on the grounds during previous surveys. Drawing becomes a way of connecting scientific observation with an artistic way of seeing.
Brussels-based Hana Miletić delved into historical songbooks of the Norbertine nuns of Gempe preserved at the abbey. Handwritten dedications, melodies and traces of use are translated into new textiles and new vocal compositions, performed by Amina Szecsödy.
Felipe Mujica discovered historical compass roses in seventeenth-century surveying manuscripts. For Rosa de los vientos (2026), he translates them into large textile banners. Workshops with local communities will further expand the project.
High above the library, Laure Prouvost creates a new site-specific landscape among the historic timber roof structure. Branches, ceramic birds, nets and found objects nestle among the beams, allowing visitors to literally view the abbey from a different perspective.
For a new version of La Pensée Férale, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané takes as his starting point a dead tree on the grounds that has since become an important habitat for woodpeckers, wild bees, insects and fungi. Its exact form is cast in bronze, placing permanence alongside ecological transformation.

Transmission: what do we pass on?

A second important thread running through the exhibition is transmission: how knowledge, stories, rituals and memories are passed from one generation to the next.

Some threads are literally visible — woven into textiles, recorded in manuscripts, preserved in architecture or worn into a path. Others are more fleeting: a melody, a voice, a repeated gesture or a story passed down within a community.

But transmission never simply means preservation. Every act of remembering also involves selection, interpretation and transformation. An archive tells us what was preserved, but equally what disappeared or was never recorded.

Several artists take precisely this tension as their starting point.

Palestinian artist Noor Abed presents A Night We Held Between (2024), in which song, dance, film and Palestinian landscapes come together to create a form of collective memory. A song from the archive of the Popular Art Centre Palestine becomes a vehicle for grief, displacement, solidarity and survival.
With Julia Isídrez, knowledge is passed on through hands and material. Her ceramic sculptures draw on Guaraní traditions she learned through her mother and generations of women. Clay becomes landscape, memory and living knowledge at once.
Colombian artist María Angélica Medina makes this transmission literally visible through thread. Her ongoing Pieza de conversación (1988–) has continued to grow for decades as she knits. Conversations, silence and shared time become part of the artwork.
Erik Tlaseca likewise sees tradition as something living. His Xipe series was created through long-term collaboration with craftspeople in Oaxaca. Techniques and materials are not simply preserved, but transformed through collaboration, exchange and new contexts.
Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña uses the Andean tradition of knotted cords as a living, poetic language in Quipu Austral. Wool, voice and sound connect different landscapes and knowledge systems, presenting memory as something that is continually woven anew.

Listening as a form of connection

Sound also plays an important role in this transmission.

Sound only exists when it moves and is heard. It travels between bodies and across distances and can create temporary communities. The carillon of Park Abbey has fulfilled this role for centuries: its sounds marked moments of prayer, celebration, mourning and encounter, connecting the abbey with its surroundings.

In the exhibition, voice, music and vibration once again become ways of creating relationships.

With Carlos Casas, listening becomes an ecological exercise. Bestiary (2024) — first presented at the Venice Biennale — brings together moving images and spatial recordings of, among others, bats, bees, dolphins, donkeys and elephants. The human being is no longer automatically placed at the centre of the world.
Sound is also central to the work of Salvadoran-American artist Guadalupe Maravilla. La alegría del fuego (2023) combines sculpture, ritual and resonance. His so-called ‘healing machines’ use vibrations to create bodily and collective experiences around migration, trauma and recovery.
With Eunjo Lee, sound becomes part of a virtual landscape. The Hesapia Trilogy (2024–2025) uses 3D technology and game engines to build digital worlds in which myth, ecological uncertainty and visions of the future merge.

Landscape as a living archive

Other artists approach landscape itself as a bearer of history.

In Hear Her Calendar System A Year of Thirteen Months (2025) by Bianca Baldi, a sycamore fig tree in Ethiopia becomes a silent witness to colonial and ecological history. A photograph taken by her grandfather in 1939 during the Italian occupation forms the starting point for a work about alternative ways of understanding time and memory.
In Live Feed (2019), Rossella Biscotti examines the Western fascination with so-called ‘corpse flowers’. Behind these botanical spectacles emerge stories of classification, colonial circulation, scientific knowledge and the movement of species and information.
Pierre Huyghe presents Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). In an abandoned restaurant in the evacuation zone around Fukushima, a masked, trained monkey moves through a landscape in which human structures have disappeared, while other forms of life continue. Human and animal, nature and culture, autonomy and conditioning become increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another.
American artist Meg Webster, a pioneer of ecological art, presents the highly elemental intervention Sand Circle (1980). A circle of sand becomes at once an image of concentration, geological time and continuous change. Every movement, touch or shift in humidity can alter its form once again.

Power, labour and the traces people leave behind

In Threading Landscapes, landscape is not exclusively natural. It also encompasses the political, social and material structures in which people live.

Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt presents They Shoot Horses (2017), a monumental velvet curtain pierced by hundreds of steel nails. The work is both alluring and threatening, evoking associations with borders, exclusion, vulnerability and political history.
Amol Patil presents five sculptures from The Shadow of Lustre (2024). Drawing on the history of Dalit communities and Mumbai’s working-class neighbourhoods, he explores how caste, labour and migration become inscribed in bodies, materials and architecture.
With Ahmed Umar, the body itself becomes a landscape of memory, spirituality and diaspora. In Glowing Phalanges, he brings together Islamic traditions, devotional objects and personal experiences in an exploration of faith, agency and new forms of connection.

Care: heritage as a living practice

Within Threading Landscapes, care is not an abstract concept, but a practice of attention, maintenance and responsibility: tending a garden, restoring a building, listening to someone, keeping a tradition alive or repairing something that has been damaged.

The restoration of Park Abbey thus becomes part of the exhibition’s narrative at Museum PARCUM.

Restoration, after all, never simply means returning to an earlier state. It requires choices: what do we preserve? What do we change? Which layers of time do we want to keep visible? And how do we make the past meaningful again in the present?

After a long process, a deliberate choice was made for a gentle restoration, in which no single historical state was reconstructed, but the different traces of time remain legible.

As a result, spaces that for centuries were used exclusively by the Norbertines are becoming accessible to everyone for the first time. Visitors can now discover, among other spaces, the historic library, refectory, chapter house, salons, the abbot’s apartment, cloisters, winter chapel and monumental attics.

This means that the completion of the restoration is not an endpoint.

Every generation inherits a place that is already in motion. Some threads need to be protected or repaired. Others need to be loosened to make room for something new. And still others have yet to be added.

Threading Landscapes takes precisely this idea as its starting point: we do not inherit a finished world. We participate in its continual becoming.

“The restoration of Park Abbey is not only about preserving an exceptional monument. It also raises the question of what we want to do with such a place today. With Threading Landscapes, the abbey once again becomes a place for encounter, artistic imagination and critical reflection. Heritage never tells a single, fixed story: every generation adds new meanings to it.”— Stefan Van Lani, curator of the abbey's collection

The curators

Katya García-Antón is director and chief curator of the Northern Norway Art Museum in Tromsø and previously worked at, among others, OCA Norway, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Reina Sofía and the Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her practice connects contemporary art with ecology, Indigenous knowledge and decolonial thinking.

María Inés Rodríguez is director of the Walter Leblanc Foundation in Brussels and curator-at-large at MASP in São Paulo. She previously led CAPC Bordeaux and held curatorial positions at, among others, MUAC in Mexico City, MUSAC and Jeu de Paume.

Daniel Feldman is an architect, urban designer and founder of ZITA in Bogotá. His work focuses on socially engaged architecture, sustainable reuse and the transformation of existing heritage into places for cultural and social use.

Ana Sokoloff is a New York-based independent curator and art advisor and founder of Sokoloff + Associates. She was previously vice president and head of the Latin American Art department at Christie’s and develops exhibitions and projects that place Latin American art within a broader international context.

PRESS CONFERENCE & PRESS PREVIEW

Thursday 22 October 2026 — Museum PARCUM, Park Abbey, Leuven

To mark the completion of the restoration of the monastic complex and the opening of Threading Landscapes, PARCUM and Park Abbey invite the Belgian and international press to a preview on Thursday 22 October 2026.

During the press event, the restoration and the exhibition will be presented for the first time as one integrated narrative. Ahead of the public opening, journalists will be given access to the restored abbey spaces and artworks, with opportunities to interview the curators and experts involved.

10.00 am — Welcome
10.15 am — Press conference on the restoration, opening up of the site and Threading Landscapes
11.15 am — Guided tour of the restored abbey spaces and exhibition
12.15 pm — Reception / lunch and opportunity for interviews
1.00 pm — Scheduled end

With, among others, Minister Weyts, Wouter Jaspers, director of PARCUM, the curatorial team, Katrien Deckers, architect, and Stefan Van Lani, curator of Park Abbey.

Press registration

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Threading Landscapes: Art at Park Abbey
24 October 2026 – 28 March 2027

During the opening weekend of 24 and 25 October, additional activities will take place and admission will be free.

Curators: Katya García-Antón, María Inés Rodríguez, Daniel Feldman, Ana Sokoloff

Artists

Noor Abed, Gabriela Albergaria, Leonor Antunes, Bianca Baldi, Rossella Biscotti, Ana María Caballero, Carlos Casas, Edith Dekyndt, Pierre Huyghe, Julia Isídrez, Tarik Kiswanson, Irene Kopelman, Eunjo Lee, Guadalupe Maravilla, María Angélica Medina, Hana Miletić, Felipe Mujica, Amol Patil, Laure Prouvost, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Erik Tlaseca, Ahmed Umar, Cecilia Vicuña and Meg Webster.

Museum PARCUM
Abdij van Park 7
3001 Leuven
Tuesday – Sunday: 10.00 am – 5.00 pm
Closed on Mondays

Tickets are now available via www.abdijvanpark.be

Standard: €16
Leuven residents and City of Leuven staff: €12
Ages 19–25: €6
UiTPAS reduced rate: €3
Up to and including age 18: free
Group tours available on request

Press information & interview requests

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

Selection of images