What do you think will be the local repercussions and global ramifications of the Flemish government’s decision to declass M HKA’s from its status as a national museum? How can we fight locally and internationally these decisions and the detrimental interference of political power in cultural institutions more broadly? To this end, do you have practical strategies to suggest, either drawn from your personal experience or from other examples of struggles to save or build an institution?
I work in the Netherlands but live in Belgium, and I’ve been professionally active in Belgium for about twelve years now. I’ve sat on many committees, worked at STUK in Leuven, and have been part of the Venice Biennale jury for both Belgium and the Netherlands. I also curated the Dutch Pavilion in 2024. All of this gives me a sense of where decisions like these reverberate, and of the repercussions for those of us on the ground. Politicians often don’t. They simply don’t register the impact – but for us, the effects are immediate. The loss of A.PASS as it existed in Brussels, for instance, and the complete disappearance of HISK (Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten) in Flanders, has had a tremendous effect. People often don’t realise that these systems were built up over decades – twenty, thirty years of labour, relationships, and accumulated knowledge. They’re not just organisations; they’re part of ecosystems that should be handled with care.
We experienced something similar in the Netherlands in 2012, when the Jan van Eyck Academy lost its subsidies entirely. The government decided that culture needed to absorb a significant portion of the austerity cuts – about €250 million out of a total cultural budget of €800 million, roughly one third. We lost everything overnight and only later regained enough funding to survive. We had to campaign intensely. And that is one strategy: campaigning. We began demonstrating what we had built over the decades. The academy has existed since 1948 – countless important artists have passed through. There was a strong foundation to point to. At the same time, our previous director tried to understand why the cuts targeted certain organisations. He realised that part of the problem was our own lack of visibility. I suspect M HKA may be facing something similar. Sometimes you have to ask: What does the government think this institution is or isn’t doing? What narrative are they operating from?
What our director did was to rebuild visibility, and he did that through investment. While we were campaigning on one side, we were renovating on the other: opening up the building, creating a café-restaurant, building gardens, making the institution more accessible and inviting. These investments were crucial, and because of them the academy is now thriving. It was a layered strategy: multiple actions happening simultaneously to regain visibility and, with it, the trust of local and national politics. And it worked. It took seven years, but by the time I arrived, things had stabilised. The institution was visible again, which meant I could focus on content. But I also kept pushing visibility, because politicians genuinely do not understand what we do. You have to communicate with them constantly – explain what artistic research is, why residency structures matter, why these ecosystems are essential.
Another important step that helped enormously was building connections beyond the art field: to education, universities, scientific institutions, and local organisations. This positioned us alongside sectors that people already understand. When you place yourself next to a university, for instance, people suddenly grasp that we, too, are doing fundamental research – just in a different way. The analogy clarifies our role.
For me, the lesson is that you have to work on many fronts at once: visibility, alliances, campaigning, investment, and cross-sector relationships. Together, these elements help people understand why you exist and why your work matters. You can never switch off. You must stay alert. Because the moment you stop actively articulating your value, people, and thus politicians, can fill the vacuum with their own assumptions. Instead, you need to keep providing them the information to understand what your organisation, and what art is about, which requires constant presence and constant communication.
Belgium is, of course, a different context. It’s a very hierarchical system: everything comes directly from the ministry. The Minister of Culture can literally fire the director of a museum. In the Netherlands, instead, institutions operate as independent foundations; the minister is not your boss. That difference shapes how institutions can respond, advocate, and protect themselves.
Through the logic of economic rationalisation, political administrations can dictate radical overhauls of the cultural landscape with unimaginable damaging effects for the local arts ecosystem. In the face of a populist economic discourse that increasingly pits investment in the arts and culture sector against the funding of other fundamental social services, how do we defend the vital value that a museum of contemporary art such as M HKA plays in its situated context?
The Jan van Eyck Academie has had to navigate several waves of political, economic, and social pressure. In that sense, there may indeed be lessons to draw from our experience. On the question of efficiency and economic rationalisation, these decisions can completely reshape a cultural landscape. The populist rhetoric that pits culture against other social needs only intensifies that pressure. Then the question becomes: how do you defend the essential value of an institution like M HKA, or like ours?
For me, part of the answer lies in what I said earlier: visibility, campaigning, and making your contribution unmistakably clear. Politicians rarely understand what we do, so you have to keep showing them, continuously. And, as I said, you have to build connections beyond the art world. That cross-sector approach helps people grasp why art matters, especially when budgets are being justified in strictly economic terms. You need to work on many fronts simultaneously, and never allow politicians to define the narrative for you. Cultural institutions must articulate their purpose, or someone else will do it for them.
One thing to keep in mind is the difference between the civic layer of government and the political layer. The political layer operates on a four-year cycle and can be highly rhetorical, populist even. But the civic layer simply continues; it has a different temporality. It does not swing with every election, like in the United States for instance. For us, maintaining a relationship with the civic layer has been crucial, but at the same time, we kept feeding the political layer too. You have to work on both fronts. Long-term infrastructural changes, or transitions set in motion ten years earlier, will continue regardless of temporary political shifts. The delay between political decision-making and civic implementation is long enough to allow you to build, develop and explain your case, even as you respond to political rhetoric.
Populism exists, but it is also a lot of rhetorics. You can still sit at the table with an N-VA [Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, a Flemish nationalist, conservative political party in Belgium] politician and find points of agreement. There’s also a great deal of co-optation: the N-VA, for instance, loves to use the word ‘ecosystem.’ And you can play with the language, question whether you’re talking about the same thing, and push your own narrative through their terminology. If ‘ecosystem’ means networks, connections, things that grow from the bottom up, then you can work with that, because they want it too.
In Belgium now, there is clearly an infrastructural shift happening under the banner of efficiency. We’ve seen similar processes in education, for instance at LUCA School of Arts, where organisations are being absorbed into university administrations. These are enormous processes, sometimes provincial, sometimes national. They are large, slow-moving systems, which might be difficult to fight. But what you can do is feed politicians with a cultural vision that extends beyond your own institution.
That approach has always worked for me. When the ‘efficiency’ model was being pushed, I would say: I understand your goal but remember that this will affect how networks function. It will alter international relationships. It will change your position in the world. And that’s not abstract – it’s exactly what happens. When we lost HISK, which brought twenty or thirty international residents to the Flanders each year out of hundreds or thousands of applications, we lost an enormous global network of connections.
Responding to external pressures while trying to strengthen your internal mission is a continual process of adjustment, which can be extremely difficult. When I arrived at Jan van Eyck in 2018, I felt we were at the end of a previous cycle, and I used that moment to articulate a long-term vision up to 2030. The goal was to transform the academy into a resilient institution, regardless of what might happen politically or economically. A context-based academy that guides how we work, how we think about art, and how we respond to a changing world. That long-term thinking remains essential. We’ve thrived because of it. Without that work, we would have lost – without question.
The meaning and value of a collection is inextricably connected to its context and its history. What are the implications and costs of dismantling and relocating a site-specific and long-standing museum collection – in cultural, social, legal, political and economic terms? What intangible and not easily measurable values are lost in this process? And how do we surface and make visible such a loss in a language that is plain and understood by both political interlocutors and the public at large?
I can’t speak about the M HKA collection specifically because I don’t know it well enough and I’m careful not to claim expertise I don’t have. What I can say, from my experience, is that when you remove a collection from its situated context, you inevitably lose the historical conditions that shaped it. A collection is never neutral; it is built by people, in a certain moment, within a certain ecosystem. When you uproot it, you lose those layers of meaning – the relationships, the genealogies, the forms of knowledge that only exist in that specific place.
You also lose what you might call a long-term memory of the field. Once you break that chain, it’s extremely hard to rebuild it. Politicians rarely consider any of this. They look at numbers and buildings, not at how meaning accumulates through situated practices. So the question is: how do you make such losses visible in a language that resonates publicly? I don’t have a ready formula. You have to address both the symbolic dimension – which is deep but hard to translate – and the practical consequences that affect people’s daily work: the disappearance of infrastructures, of opportunities, of circulation within the field.
M KHA’s collection is both internationally oriented and firmly rooted in the local art scene, particularly in post-war avant-garde art in Antwerp and Flanders. While contemporary art is often mistakenly seen as globalist, it is arguably the interplay between the local and the global in collections such as M HKA’s that enables one to make sense of an increasingly multipolar world. How do we articulate the importance of maintaining this dialogue between the here and the elsewhere within a museum collection? And what specific instances from M HKA’s collection or other museums can help us to support this case?
One needs to be careful with the concepts of ‘local’ and ‘global’. Take the climate debates, for example: you might turn to the idea of locality, but that can very quickly be interpreted as Eurocentric or even chauvinistic, as a call to reinstate borders. During the pandemic we came very close to that kind of thinking. At Jan Van Eyck Academie, we have to ask ourselves: what do we do with thirty-one nationalities at the academy? Why do we have thirty-six people from all over the world here? What is the purpose? I’m honest about that question, including with politicians. I say: if we don’t, we end up with a Euro-American situation dominated by those with money and privilege. And the art that emerges will reflect exactly that. The aesthetics would simply mirror privilege. We need instead multi-vocality. It’s an intelligent system to bring together many people with different perspectives – they give you insight into what the world actually is. But I also resist the traditional model of internationalism. For me, that model is rooted in the metropolis; it has very little to do with, say, someone coming from a rural village in Africa, who has entirely different needs and a different understanding of art. That recognition forces us to completely rethink our assumptions about quality and the idea of ‘excellence.’
We live in a global world – but not in the sense of a multinational, globalist world. It’s more a matter of local-to-local: bringing different localities together within a new locality. We need to understand what happens on the ground. A purely globalist perspective works against what we want; if mobility is only about the free movement of goods, that undermines the local ecologies we value. We’re constantly navigating between two forms of co-optation: being pulled into a nationalist framework on the one hand, and into a multinational globalist one on the other. But what we actually want is for localities to meet and form meaningful connections.
When nothing structural changes, we continue to reproduce the same conditions. Look at Documenta, for instance: it collapsed because we simply shifted from one form to another without addressing the deeper issues. And it’s still collapsing, because you cannot solve these problems through tokenism. These problems like between nationalism and tokenism so you can’t say, ‘We’ll include five women, or five Black or brown artists, and everything will be fixed.’ The underlying conflict isn’t resolved. In a local situation like M HKA, some of these ideas might resonate.
Collections are established through relationships of mutual trust and responsibility. A museum has a duty of care towards its collections and donors, towards the artists – dead or alive – whose work it preserves, and towards the diverse publics and local communities it caters for. How do we defend the will of donors who entrusted a collection to a particular institution when that collection is at risk of being dismantled and relocated? What legal instruments and ethical protocols can we appeal to?
I don’t have detailed expertise in this area. In the Netherlands, the museum sector is quite a centralised system; I’m not sure how it works in Belgium. But the key question is: what is your strategy regarding the collection? As you mentioned, M HKA holds a plurality of positions, which is important. It made me think of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, which is increasingly put in the situation to defend the collections it holds, because they are being questioned from many directions.
I think quite differently about collections, as I’m primarily concerned with the living arts. Right now, in the Netherlands, we have a large number of museums, and an enormous amount of public money flows into them. But that money does not go into artists’ wages. It does not translate into income for people. What it does translate into is visibility for museums and for their institutional structures. There is a real discrepancy, and it’s my personal view that we could organise things differently.
But I do think a collection like M HKA’s, with its particular specificity, needs to be maintained. I don’t understand the reasons behind the proposed infrastructural changes. I would want to see, very concretely, how this idea of ‘efficiency’ translates economically and structurally, and what it dismantles. More broadly, perhaps we need to rethink the importance we assign to collections and the way they are structured today.
We need to consider our relationship to markets as well. At the moment, I’m dealing with the increasing tension between private and public funding. In the Netherlands, we are seeing a surge in private money, and this is happening globally. As the public sector shrinks, the private sector expands. And that money is tied to trade and to structures we often critique. There is a shift happening in which large private capital increasingly controls the entire chain of artistic practice, from conception to production to presentation. That affects everyone: museums, residencies, artists.
But that doesn’t immediately solve M HKA situation. What M HKA needs to do now is to engage in the debate and speak directly with politicians. That’s the arena where this must happen. We tried something similar with HISK and A.PASS. HISK is still fighting, though I don’t know where things stand but they don’t look good. From what I’ve observed, once these processes start to drag on, you lose. There is a momentum you have to seize. Either you act now and go in fully, perhaps even with an ultimatum, or you let it drag on and watch it dissolve. And that is precisely what some people are counting on.