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?
First, we must dare to acknowledge that M HKA indeed faced significant challenges in its museological functions – ranging from basic caretaking, such as collection registration and storage, to broader substantive questions regarding acquisition, display, and dissemination. These issues were repeatedly noted in evaluation reports, yet, frankly, they were also an open secret. In that sense, as a community, we could and should have spoken up earlier.
M HKA’s leadership has consistently attributed these shortcomings to a lack of funding and inadequate infrastructure – but this explanation is too convenient. Insufficient energy was devoted to exploring solutions and strategies to strengthen its museological apparatus within the existing financial and infrastructural framework, for instance through collaboration, and an adapted vision and approach. I have always believed that these challenges could have been reframed as an opportunity to develop a collective museological model based on collaboration, exchange, and productive dissonance – allowing multiple museums to seek out each other’s company without compromising artistic autonomy. M HKA was not alone in rejecting this path; other Flemish museums similarly opted for a ‘competitive’ approach, pursuing autonomous growth, often using new building initiatives as milestones, thereby reinforcing the centralising narrative that now threatens their sustainability.
Consequently, we find ourselves in a particularly delicate situation: the issues highlighted by the government are real, and the scenario chosen to address them was, in effect, already suggested by the museum leadership itself.
The first step moving forward must be twofold. First, we need to fundamentally challenge the assumption that M HKA – and other Flemish contemporary museums – are only viable if they undergo scaling-up, and question centralisation as the only possible way forward. Second, we must insist on exploring strategies to address existing shortcomings before contemplating the declassification of any museum. There is no sound governance in discarding a museum before at least trying to fix its problems – especially when the government itself has been actively complicit in allowing these issues to persist for decades.
The latter points to the next important step: ‘infrastructuring’ the museum’s governance. Governance is not sexy work, but it’s where everything begins and ends. It’s the backbone that makes the institution practice what it preaches: only then can it be truly credible and political. Politics does not merely lie in what institutions do in their programmes, but even more in how they do this, and for whom. The most important curatorial project today might even be the making of the institution, more than the making of exhibitions. However, because our field – and our policy makers – are so geared towards public visibility, this foundational ‘infrastructuring’ work is often underaddressed, skipped, or even refuted by managerial directors that limit curators to the boundaries of the exhibition space. Infrastructuring is literally limited to building hypervisible flagships, so again encapsulated in visibility politics, rather than thinking about the institution as an immaterial device infrastructuring relationships with different constituencies.
In M HKA, this infrastructuring, and specifically the infrastructuring of a transparent, ethical and fair governance with the board as a crucial device, needs to be restarted from scratch. Who holds power over what? Who should act when? For too long, certain people within or nearby the museum were able to hold power or benefit from the governance’s opacity and ambiguity, prioritising personal relations over clear mandates and procedures. The role of the board and the funding authorities were never sufficiently clarified. The director and the members of the management team were never properly evaluated.
This is where we must directly challenge the government’s current moves: not only are they to be held directly accountable for M HKA’s long-time deficient governance, failing to even follow their very own ‘code of good governance’, but also current decisions being made without first infrastructuring the right conditions. Instead of seeking council and expertise in M HKA and deeper in the field, they have made all foundational decisions within a small, not-always-informed bubble of advisors and (junior) administrators, prioritising exchange with ‘celebrity’ artists and political stakeholders. Although, there are currently dozens of separate communication lines mostly taking place in cafeterias, next steps remain uncannily undetermined. What will be crucial then for us, is not to be satisfied with pro forma meetings, but to demand transparent and fair procedures moving forward, that will eventually put the right people in the right place to start this much-needed ‘infrastructuring’. What we need to do from our end, as a community, is to also act beyond our personal needs and interests, and act from the perspective of what the institution needs, and not only from what we need from the institution.
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?
If we, as art workers, embrace a worldview of solidarity – which I certainly do – we must also remain sensitive to the types of public demands we place in relation to other societal needs. The best way to avoid fuelling a populist discourse that pits the arts against fundamental social services is to practice radical solidarity ourselves.
I was never in favour of the massive new M HKA building project. While I understand that the current museum infrastructure requires improvement, I found it difficult to justify the scale of the project – just as I struggle to defend the scale of the new Kanal Pompidou museum in Brussels. To me, such claims were excessive for a museum model I no longer believe in. These are precisely the kinds of demands we should avoid if we wish to maintain public trust and support.
Moreover, planning regulations were relaxed to permit a taller museum building, which in turn is driving up land values and promoting profit-driven development and speculation in the surrounding area. This is exactly the type of mechanism we should be working to counteract – we should infrastructure against – if we want to remain credible and consistent in our commitment to solidarity.
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?
Choosing a centralising model is a neo-liberal return to a nineteenth-century model that erases the specificity and strength of the Flemish museum field: namely the multiplicity and dissonance generated by multiple ‘small’ museums for a city (Jan De Vylder once rephrased Mies van der Rohe in this way) with locally rooted, subjective and ‘unfinished’ collections.
The political capacity of these collections lies exactly in their relationship to a specific place of which they collect, activate and rewrite the stories and narratives that hold it together. When a collection is grounded in place and community, it is literally ‘in’ it, rather than ‘about’ it, and only then can it form and be informed. When the collection is only ‘about’ a place, it becomes more detached, static and eventually transactional, in that its narratives can no longer be co-created: they become modes of representation. Even though this representation can be critically addressed also in an art centre, only an active acquisition policy can actively rewrite, enhance or supplement it. An arts centre can at best represent a history; it can’t write it.
So what we lose with M HKA as a museum, is the capacity to contribute to contemporary art history from the specific locality of Antwerp and its communities. More broadly and perhaps more importantly, we also lose the capacity of multiplicity in the writing of art history in the entire region, as we will limit ourselves to only one centralised and transactional collecting body in Ghent, that will need to become a kind of non-place in its own collecting capacity. Whether a non-place or a nation state, I would say that this change overlaps with the intention to turn ‘artworks into emblems of identity once again, instead of instruments for reflection, dissensus, and dialogue with other ways of thinking’ as Philippe Pirotte writes in an exchange we recently had.
This transactional nature is a typical characteristic of a ‘centralising’ scheme. Storing, organising, packaging, describing, moving, displaying and even producing discourse around a collection becomes transactional. Conversely in a ‘small’ city museum, a collection is a pretext for conversation by actively ‘retaining’ it. This ‘retaining’ is important, because it resists reduction to transactionality. It might be inconvenient as it requires invisible and inefficient forms of care and labour and forces us to slow down and work on the maintenance of artworks that, over time, we may doubt are still relevant. Yet it is precisely because of this inconvenience that it matters: this burden forces us to actually deal with the collection, to continue questioning our choices, and to rewrite, activate, and expand the stories through which communities that surround us relate to it. It is by being a burden and a nuisance that the collection is kept alive.
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?
When we remove collections from their local ‘ground’, and cease to reground them through acquisitions, collections turn into mere transportable goods, losing their status as active conversation pieces for the writing of a shared history. History is often written only through one lens, without making space for the multiplicity that is the world today. We need to fight for M HKA not only because of its role as an institution concerned with the (writing of) history as a critical and actively co-produced endeavour in a world which is instead characterised by rising populist politics, capitalist excesses and fake news. We should also oppose a centralising model rooted in the nineteenth-century project of the nation state. Flanders already has a much more relevant alternative to it: an ensemble of small city museums which together can craft a more diverse and layered regional narrative. In this plural model, collaboration can support demands for artistic autonomy. This exchange of knowledge and resources activates a shared responsibility for collecting Flanders’ contemporary artistic heritage. As Philippe Pirotte puts it: ‘By forcing specificity, temporality, and diversity into the exclusively contemporary playground of one single programme, one loses the ability to host multiple narratives through the heritage, and deprives Flanders’ largest city of a space for developing locally grounded artistic evaluation. Despite all its shortcomings, M HKA precisely fulfilled that function: it was a home for what was continually on its way toward an artistic canon, within local, regional, and international contexts.’