The history of M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, reaches back to 1947, when the idea of a multipurpose building for cultural activities was first put forward by mayor of Antwerp Lode Craeybeckx. In 1970, this proposal would materialise in the form of the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (I.C.C.), the first public institution for contemporary art in Flanders and M HKA’s direct precursor. In 1977, I.C.C.’s director and curator Flor Bex invited Gordon Matta-Clark to intervene in one of the city’s vacant buildings. Unbeknownst to the artist, this work – titled Office Baroque in honour of the four hundredth anniversary of the Antwerp Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens – would be Matta-Clark’s last major oeuvre before his untimely death the following year. Shortly after Matta-Clark’s death, Bex suggested preserving Office Baroque as an homage to the artist and integrating it as a core of the new museum for contemporary art, M HKA, which was to be built on the surrounding parcels.
While the attempt to preserve Matta-Clark’s poetic gesture of ‘anarchitecture’ was ultimately unsuccessful, the artworks donated for fundraising purposes by numerous artists from Belgium and abroad would eventually form the nucleus of M HKA’s collection. Sifting through Bex’s correspondence from that period in M HKA’s archives, one is struck by the many letters that were sent in defence of the museum. One such letter from Ingrid Sischy, then at Artforum, ends with: ‘Good luck in fighting for that museum of contemporary art in Antwerp’. Her words resonate presciently in the present moment.
When the new museum finally opened its doors on 20 June 1987, its initial collection included about one hundred fifty works from the Foundation Gordon Matta-Clark. Since then, the collection has continued to expand thanks to a thoughtful acquisition policy built upon the avant-garde tradition in Antwerp since the 1960s, today’s multipolar world, a broader focus more on visual culture and an ethos of social commitment. Today, M HKA’s collection includes more than 8000 objects, comprising significant artworks by regional as well as international artists, and spanning different media such as artists’ books, artists’ novels and devices that belong to the pre-history of film. The collection is made up of a number of subcollections, some of which are site-specific or immovable such as the Panamarenko House which was donated by the artist with all its contents to the museum in 2006.
This decennial history of institution- and collection- building is on the verge of being undone by political fiat. On 6 October 2025, the culture minister of the Flemish government outlined plans for a radical restructuring of the Flemish museum landscape, dissolving M HKA’s status as a national museum and handing its collection and function over to S.M.A.K in Ghent. According to these plans, by 2028, M HKA would be completely stripped of its collection, converted into an arts centre and restricted to the role of hosting exhibitions, residencies and programmes. At no point during the process were M HKA’s leadership or its stakeholders consulted. This rushed decision not only raises questions about the operational feasibility and the legal implications of handing an extensive and locally-rooted collection to another institution; it also poses serious concerns about the repercussions it will have on the artistic and cultural ecosystem of Antwerp, as well as on the diversity and pluralism of the contemporary art landscape in Flanders more broadly. Many artists who entrusted M HKA to be the custodians of their work, including Emila Kabakov and Anish Kapoor, are outraged by this decision.
The news broke one week before Afterall’s editorial team met at M HKA for our biannual editorial meeting – M HKA being Afterall’s oldest editorial partner since 2007. As we reviewed the content for the current double issue, with its focus on infrastructure, we couldn’t avoid thinking of the museum itself as an infrastructure made of people, buildings and collections, which is more or less stably integrated with other infrastructures – governmental structures, public and private funding bodies etc. In this roundtable, we depart from the current situation at M HKA and ask thinkers, activists and cultural workers in the museum sector to reflect on the infrastructural conditions of contemporary art institutions in the current political and economic landscape. We hope this dossier offers not just a body of evidence to support M HKA’s ongoing case, but also a resource to fend off the pernicious rippling effects that such an attempt might have in other contexts too.
Read the responses to our questionnaire by:
Pascal Gielen, professor of Sociology of Culture and Politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA), University of Antwerp
Hicham Khalidi, director of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands
Dieter Roelstraete, curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago, former curator at M HKA (2003–11)
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Antwerp-based artsit, and Tamara Beheydt, art-writer and curator based in Brussels