Park Abbey, founded in 1129, 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. After a fourteen-year restoration campaign, the abbey has been carefully restored and sustainably reimagined, reopening fully to the public in October 2026 as a place where heritage, culture, nature and reflection converge.
The cloister, the vaulted halls with their impressive ceiling frescoes and the colourful stained-glass windows by Jan de Caumont (recognised as a Flemish masterpiece) at Museum PARCUM, together with the surrounding 42-hectare nature reserve, form a unique site where meaning, religion, heritage, culture, knowledge and innovation come together.
Within this renewed context, Threading Landscapes invites contemporary artists to engage with the abbey’s layered architecture and landscape, exploring questions of being, attending and acting in a world where traditional spiritual and social structures are fragmenting and new forms of belonging are still emerging. Works respond to the Abbey’s architecture, its gardens, and its rhythms, creating dialogues between the temporal weight of the past and the immediacy of contemporary practice. The exhibition also presents highly new artworks specially created for the project.
The exhibition positions Park Abbey not only as a historical monument but as a living cultural ecosystem. By threading contemporary interventions through historical space, the exhibition examines how location shapes meaning, how art negotiates ritual and reflection beyond traditional religious frameworks, and how the body, time, and attention inhabit architectural and cultural memory. Visitors are encouraged to experience the reimagined Abbey as a heritage site and as an active presence within the community, creating an environment where contemplation, movement, and encounters coalesce.
About the exhibition
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..
Artists inhabit the abbey and its surroundings through installations, film, sculpture, sound and performative interventions. Their works respond to the architecture, gardens and waterways of the site, examining ecological interdependence, cultural memory, technological transformation and social connection. In doing so, the exhibition foregrounds presence as a critical practice — attentive engagement with the world, ritual beyond religion and action rooted in care and responsibility. Participating artists respond to local and global realities, crafting works that examine ecological, technological, and social interdependencies while fostering trust, solidarity, and new imaginaries for collective futures.
The Abbey’s park and communal spaces extend the exhibition beyond its walls and into Leuven’s diasporic and academic networks. Collaborations with local institutions such as the Carillonneur and the abbey brewery highlight intergenerational, cross-disciplinary, and site-specific practices.
Through new commissions, performative interventions, and ephemeral works, the exhibition traces the rhythms of human and non-human presence across architecture and landscape. The Abbey becomes a laboratory for exploring how art, action, and ritual—secular and spiritual—intersect with ethical and ecological responsibility.
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.
Ultimately, Threading Landscapes positions Park Abbey not only as a historical monument but as an active site of contemporary inquiry, where introspection and imagination converge to envision futures grounded in care, presence, and collective possibility.
Participating artists (selection, more artists to be announced soon)
Leonor Antunes · Edith Dekyndt · Carlos Casas · Tarik Kiswanson · Dala Nasser · Erik Tlaseca · Jenny Holzer · Pierre Huyghe · Irene Kopelman · Gabriela Albergaria · Meg Webster · Bianca Baldi · Hana Miletić · Ana María Caballero · Felipe Mujica · Laure Prouvost · Cecilia Vicuña · Guadalupe Maravilla · Rossella Biscotti · María Angélica Medina · Ahmed Umar · Eujon Lee · Julia Isídrez
Practical information
Threading Landscapes: Art at Park Abbey
24 October 2026 - 28 March 2027
Museum PARCUM — Park Abbey
Abdij van Park 7
3001 Leuven
Belgium
Curated by Katya García Antón, Daniel Feldman, María Inés Rodríguez and Ana Sokoloff
