Ooidonk Art Festival, Goed te Réables estate, Deinze (Leie region), Belgium, 18 June – 30 August 2026

A landscape is never finished. It shifts with the light, the seasons, the hand that works it. What happens when contemporary art settles into that landscape and the walker is asked to slow down?

The Ooidonk Art Festival returns for a fifth edition, this year deliberately concentrated: one location, around twenty artists from Belgium, Northern France and the south of the Netherlands, a trail through meadow, grazing cattle and the open horizon of the historic Goed te Réables estate. There is no strict curatorial manifesto, rather a shared sensibility: artists who take nature, landscape and natural processes as material and context. Monumental sculptures punctuate the land at points where work and surroundings cannot be seen apart. Among the artists is Koen Vanmechelen.

Koen Vanmechelen (°1965) is an artist whose work moves at the crossroads of art, science and community, driven by questions of identity, diversity and our shared future as animals on this planet. His recent exhibition We Thought We Were Alone in Venice stages this as an explosion of hybridity, across countless forms and species. The chicken, which he has crossbred since his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project into a carrier of genetic and cultural diversity, is one figure among many there, an entry point into a far larger inquiry into how we live together and how we change.

For Ooidonk he brings the egg from which that chicken emerges. In Between (2022) is a solid marble egg, carved from roughly eleven tons of white stone and one of the most monumental egg forms in his oeuvre. The egg stands for the origin of life and for a future still open in every direction. On its shell sits a golden date that does not exist, a reference to possibilities not yet fixed. The egg does not move, it does not break, it waits. What lies inside stays undecided as long as no one opens it. The work captures the moment when nothing has yet begun.

Between the meadow and the sky, the egg stands as a promise biding its time.

EXHIBITION FACTS

Ooidonk Art Festival

Goed te Réables estate, Deinze (Leie region)

18 June – 30 August 2026

Paid entrance

Open Thursday to Sunday, 2 to 7 p.m.

Nocturnes and special events activate the site beyond regular hours.

More info: www.OoidonkArtFestival.be