Wilhelminapark viert de zomer (Wilhelminapark Celebrates Summer) is a vibrant neighbourhood festival held annually in Tilburg’s Wilhelminapark. The seventh edition is scheduled to take place from 12 to 23 August 2026. For twelve days, the park is transformed into a lively oasis featuring live music, creativity and delicious food.
PARK is also contributing to the festival with the programme Binnenste Buiten. Artists Yasser Ballemans, Roman Nieuweboer and Jabu Arnell will be present in the park with unique installations and performances. And there is plenty to experience inside PARK too, encouraging visitors to come inside and creating a wonderful interplay between indoors and outdoors.
PARK is open on Saturdays and Sundays during WVDZ from 1:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Yasser Ballemans – Soul Search Museum
Open on 15 and 16 August 1.00 pm – 6.00 pm
At the Soul Search Museum, visitors are invited to sculpt their ‘soul’ whilst blindfolded. They can leave their creation at the PARK arts venue and collect it again on the final day of the festival, so that they can go home ‘with their soul under their arm’.
Soul Search Museum is a variation on a long-running project by visual artist Yasser Ballemans, who explores collective creativity. With this installation, Ballemans establishes a ritual link between the festival in Wilhelminapark outdoors and the PARK art centre indoors.
Participants are challenged to pause for a moment and experience what it is like to shape something intangible whilst blind and groping in the dark. The work is an exercise in dealing with uncertainty and a way of learning to trust one’s senses in the here and now.
Roman Nieuweboer – Over and Under
Performance time:
22 June – 5.30 pm
A five-metre-long table, a metal structure and a body that seems to defy gravity. In Over and Under, Roman Nieuweboer moves weightlessly over and under the large table installation, aided by a counterweight. As he swings, spins and hangs, a fascinating interplay emerges between body, object and space. With this performance, Nieuweboer explores the boundary between performance art and circus, transforming a sculptural structure into a daring playground.
Roman Nieuweboer is a performance artist known for his daring and physically demanding work. With a background in the visual arts, he has developed a practice in which installation and performance art merge seamlessly. His constructions are often large-scale and striking, enabling him to perform stunt-like actions that would otherwise be physically impossible.
With sweeping gestures, he draws the audience into the work; at the same time, these gestures serve as a smokescreen that seeks to conceal the emotional charge of the situation. His work balances showmanship and vulnerability, and provokes the viewer to wonder what intentions lie behind the spectacle.
Jabu Arnell – Black Cake Franchise #5: Get Up With It
Open on 15, 16, 22 and 23 August
A growing table — constructed from found materials, ceramic objects and Black Cake (Bolo Pretu in Papiamento). Caribbean Black Cake is a rich, dense fruit cake traditionally served at Christmas and weddings in English-speaking Caribbean islands and countries. The cake is made by soaking dried fruit (raisins, currants, cherries, prunes) for months — sometimes even years — in rum and wine, amongst other things. The soaked fruit is then added to the batter and baked together to form a cake. Black Cake evolved from the British Christmas plum pudding brought over by colonists in the 18th century, which Caribbean people adapted using local ingredients such as rum and island spices. The work takes its title from the Miles Davis album Get Up With It (1974).
The installation will take shape gradually over the course of the festival and will be open to visitors at weekends.
