Brussels’ €230m Kanal-Centre Pompidou Announces Inaugural Programme

The Kanal-Centre Pompidou, billed as Europe’s largest museum development, has announced a ten-show programme ahead of its opening in Brussels later this year.

With five floors dedicated to contemporary art, the former Citroën garage will host a mix of exhibitions, displays, workshops and performances by more than 250 artists. Its 40,000-square-metre footprint is roughly one-and-a-half times larger than Guggenheim Bilbao.

At a press conference in Brussels, Kanal’s artistic director Kasia Redzisz highlighted the city’s thriving arts scene, but said it had previously lacked a dedicated contemporary art space at such scale.

‘The creativity was never missing,’ Redzisz said. ‘What was missing was an institution able to hold it, to question it, to evolve.

‘...I hope we will develop a reputation for interdisciplinarity and a commitment to telling the stories that will maybe be overlooked.’

Kanal-Centre Pompidou will open on 28 November, a year after fears around budget cuts in the Brussels-Capital Region threatened to halt its €230 million redevelopment. The centre’s annual operating costs are expected to total €35 million, the majority of which will be covered by the region’s government.

The headline exhibition, titled A truly immense journey, will offer a thematic exploration of movement and migration, featuring over 350 artworks loaned from the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Artists will include Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti and Wolfgang Tillmans.

‘All of those notions seemed very representative of Brussels,’ Redzisz told Ocula. ‘We decided to unpack this idea of movement and motion through trade and exchange, human migration, migration of ideas, and with that brief we started to navigate the Pompidou’s collection.’

Kanal’s partnership with the Centre Pompidou will run until at least 2030, when the Paris institution is slated to reopen following a five-year redevelopment. The collaboration grants Kanal access to a 150,000-strong collection of works dating from 1905 to the present, alongside advice on development and programming described by Redzisz as ‘priceless’.

The building that houses Kanal was purchased by the Brussels-Capital Region in 2015, and its retrofit assigned to a team of architects from Zurich-based EM2N, noAarchitecten in Brussels, and London’s Sergison Bates.

Together they have designed over 12,000 square metres of exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art and architecture, alongside a 400-seat auditorium, spaces for making and study, a library, archives, a bar, restaurant and book shop.

The Turner Prize-winning art, design and architecture collective, Assemble, has also designed a playground for both children and adults. 

Stephen Bates, founding partner of Sergison Bates, said the space’s design is intended ‘to feel like a public space with institutions attached’. 

To help achieve this, the building’s four entrances and central nave—described by Bates as a space for ‘civic gathering’—have been maintained. According to Bates, it is longer, though narrower, than the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

The centre will be open from 8am to 12pm, six days per week, with half of its programming free to view. Children from 27 neighbouring schools have already been welcomed to the space, as have several local groups of ‘test’ visitors.

Redzisz explained: ‘We think very carefully about our closest neighbours, these are our immediate visitors…

‘Maybe these are small-scale actions, but they hopefully sum up the idea of a participatory museum where participation doesn’t only mean outreach, but also artistic practice and active contribution and exchange.’

Kanal’s opening programme also includes An infinite woman: Black archives in two acts, which will subvert the centre’s connection to Citroën via reclamations of colonial imagery, and NO SHOW, which sees 20 Brussels artists ask, can a museum entertain?

The centre’s live art programme will include Miet Warlop’s exhibition-performance IT NEVER SSST, which will go on display following its presentation at the 61st Venice Biennale this May. —[O]

Main image: Rendering of the interior street in Kanal. Photo: © Secchi Smith/Atelier Kanal.