Antwerp’s Middelheim Museum — that 33-hectare art-forest where sculptures lurk like they’re hatching plans — goes full creature-mode this year. Monster Chetwynd lands with A FRIENDS MAKING MACHINE (16 May–11 October 2026), an outdoor exhibition that behaves more like a living organism than a tidy art show.
Its core is a new permanent commission: a sculptural “portal” wedged into the museum’s eastern edge. Not just an entrance — a mood. A crossing point for hospital patients, passing students, park wanderers, and anyone who enjoys walking through something that looks sentient. The portal grows out of the museum’s long-term collaboration with young people at the UKJA mental health hospital, tying Chetwynd’s unruly imagination to real acts of care.
From there, the show unspools into performances, sculptures, films, and workshops populated by Chetwynd’s feral cast of creatures and personas. They appear and vanish on their own schedule, as unpredictable as actual wildlife. The exhibition’s mascot: the salamander, that champion of regeneration. As Chetwynd says, “Salamanders can live both in water and on land, and thus move smoothly between two worlds, just as we do between vulnerability and strength.”
The exhibition leans into that question of survival and soft rebellion: How do we stay okay? Can art break the grind long enough to make us feel something unexpected? Can an artwork act like a rabbit hole you willingly disappear into? A FRIENDS MAKING MACHINE answers with a network of objects, bodies, and moments held together by invisible threads of play and resilience.
Meanwhile, Middelheim is celebrating its 75th birthday — still committed to its 1950 mission of sculpture for everyone. With 250 works outdoors year-round and slow-looking tours, sensory walks, and hospital collaborations, the museum doubles as Antwerp’s “green lung,” a place where art and nature fuse into a low-key survival mechanism.
As Sara Weyns, Director of Middelheim Museum, says: “As a green lung for Antwerp, Middelheim Museum’s art park offers a unique setting where encounters with art in nature support both mental and physical resilience. We look forward to Monster Chetwynd’s landmark exhibition transforming the park into a living environment that expands our ecosystem with new friends and ideas.”
In this sprawling outdoor lab, Chetwynd’s practice feels symbiotic with the landscape. It mutates, sprawls, and threads through ponds, paths, and people. Each work — especially the portal — becomes a side door into her universe, where performer, viewer, and collaborator blend into one messy, ecstatic network.
In the end, A FRIENDS MAKING MACHINE isn’t trying to be wholesome. It’s trying to be alive — regenerating connection the way salamanders regrow limbs: slowly, strangely, without apology. It turns Middelheim into a site for new relationships, new energies, and new ways of imagining what an art park can be in 2026: less monument, more organism.
words Alexa Wang
