Antwerp’s Museum of Contemporary Art Fights to Stay Open

The Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) revealed on Tuesday that an external review of a proposal to close the museum and transfer its collection found ‘flagrant illegalities’. 

Three months prior, Flemish culture minister Caroline Gennez announced that M HKA would be discontinued, sending shockwaves through the local and international art scene. Under the proposal, M HKA, which opened in 1985, would lose its museum status and instead operate as an arts centre with temporary exhibitions, residencies, workshops and artist studios.

Acting M HKA director Dieter Vankeirsbilck expressed frustration at the lack of consultation with the sector. ‘When non-binding documents are treated as if they were established policy,’ he said in a statement, ‘the legal certainty of a public institution is jeopardised.’

Gennez’s announcement also revealed that a new building plan for M HKA had been scrapped by the Flemish government, eight months after appointing Christ & Gantenbein and Bovenbouw Architectuur as project architects.

Antwerp-based artist Otobong Nkanga described the relocation as a ‘bomb’ at the Tuesday press conference.

‘My work is in the collection of M HKA and there are many artists that have trusted and believe that their work has been put in a safe place,’ she said in a video. ‘The work is connected to Antwerp itself. And to read that all this will shift and be completely broken down in a way that none of us imagined is unacceptable.’

The proposal centralises Flanders’ contemporary art to S.M.A.K. in the East Flanders capital Ghent, requiring the relocation of M HKA’s collection.

The museum shared high-profile communications to Minister Gennez in support of M HKA with the press this week.

In an email sent in November, Anish Kapoor requested the removal of all references to his artworks from Flemish institutional sites as he ‘cannot accept that they might be removed from M HKA or otherwise put at risk as part of any institutional reorganisation’.

Meanwhile, a joint letter from 24 European museum directors, including Laurent Le Bon, Taco Dibbets and Nicholas Serota, describes the proposed closure of this ‘important ambassador for contemporary art in Flanders’ as an ‘irreparable loss’.

The draft policy, which M HKA accuses of violating ‘existing regulations, binding administrative agreements, and fundamental principles of good governance’, will be formally submitted to the Flemish government for a decision today. —[O]

Main image: Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (2025). Courtesy M HKA. Photo: LUCID photography.