Couverture médiatique
Retrouvez ici un aperçu de la couverture médiatique autour à la fois de la décision du gouvernement flamand de priver le M HKA de son statut de musée et de sa collection, et de la lutte qui s’y oppose. La presse suit de près cette résistance face à un démantèlement culturel inacceptable.
‘Over our dead body’: KMSKA verzet zich tegen museumplan van cultuurminister Gennez
De Morgen - 17 Décembre 2025 - 03h00Het Antwerpse KMSKA weigert de rol die het toebedeeld krijgt in het museumplan van Vlaams minister van Cultuur Caroline Gennez (Vooruit). Dat blijkt uit een nota die onze redactie kon inkijken. Als het KMSKA voet bij stuk houdt, mag het museumplan als dood worden beschouwd.Save M HKA: A Roundtable
Afterall - 15 Décembre 2025A roundtable, departing from the current situation at M HKA in which we 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.Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Pascal Gielen
Afterall - 15 Décembre 2025The local repercussions in Antwerp will be profound. The city’s visual arts ecosystem will lose one of its primary anchors connecting it to the international museum and biennial circuits. For Flanders as a whole, the cultural impact is equally severe: with only S.M.A.K. remaining as a national-level museum for contemporary art, the international representation of living Flemish artists will effectively be cut. No single institution can take over the full infrastructural role M HKA has built over decades. This weakening will diminish the ability to contextualise and position local artists within the broader global conversation, a crucial function in today’s multipolar cultural world. Although various art centers and Kunst Hallen (such as Extra City and WIELS) mediate between local scenes and international networks, each actor contributes to that ecology. Losing M HKA as a fully empowered museum therefore constitutes a structural blow, especially for emerging and mid-career artists in Antwerp.Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Hicham Khalidi
Afterall - 15 Décembre 2025I 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.Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Dieter Roelstraete
Afterall - 15 Décembre 2025What is so singularly depressing about the political farce surrounding the proposed dismantling of M HKA is that the invoked logic of economic rationalisation still appears to have so much pull in political discourse. Haven’t the countless disasters of populist economics’ experiments with ‘austerity’ taught us anything? (The global political polycrisis is nothing other than the smouldering ruin of one such experiment in enforcing one austerity too many.) Indeed, it is utterly dispiriting that we find ourselves once again called upon to defend the various spaces of art as economically legitimate in their own right – and the fact that so many have so quickly and so vocally rallied to M HKA’s defence (even those relatively critical of that institution’s various perceived shortcomings) makes it abundantly clear that the vast majority of interested parties simply no longer buy the tired old canard of so-called ‘rationalisation’ – the last of the tenets of neoliberalism to go the way of the dodo. It is precisely this disconnect which unmasks the ministerial measure as the deeply undemocratic coup that it really is. None of us could have imagined that, in the year 2025 (of all years!), one must still come to the defence of art; and although most of us are beyond exhausted by the realisation that we have to do so regardless, we’ll rise to the challenge anyway. That in itself is a uniquely powerful indictment of the retrograde error of ‘their’ ways – as is the sobering fact that, as far as I can tell, absolutely no one seems to really want this move to happen anyway. And those who don’t care… simply don’t care.Inspectie Financiën vernietigend over stopzetten nieuwbouw M HKA: ‘Geen enkele onderbouwing’
De Morgen - 12 Décembre 2025 - 15h33Na alle ophef is er een bestand tussen minister van Cultuur Caroline Gennez (Vooruit), het M HKA en de kunstenaars. Maar achter de schermen is het koude oorlog.Communiqué Collectif du Secteur des Arts Plastiques
La FAP - 11 Décembre 2025 - 12h00Suite à l’annonce de la fermeture de plusieurs structures culturelles majeures, la plupart consacrées à la création contemporaine en arts plastiques, et en prévision de la manifestation sectorielle du 15 décembre 2025, les fédérations professionnelles des arts plastiques belges tirent un nouveau signal d’alarme face à une série d’annonces à tous les niveaux de pouvoir — fédéral, communautaire et communal — dont l’ampleur, la simultanéité et les conséquences sociales laissent entrevoir une remise en cause structurelle de l’existence même du secteur.AFI - Open Letter M HKA Minister of Culture Caroline Gennez
Artistic Freedom Initiative - 8 Décembre 2025 - 10h00Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) writes to express its concern regarding the recent communications issued by your Ministry concerning the future of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA). The announcements of October 3 and 6, which first abandoned the long-planned new museum building and then proposed dissolving M HKA’s museum status and transferring its collection and responsibilities to SMAK in Ghent, constitute an unprecedented disruption to Belgium’s contemporary arts infrastructure.Cultuurschok: het Vlaamse museumlandschap op de schop
De Wereld Morgen - 4 Décembre 2025 - 14h29De conceptnota van minister Caroline Gennez zet het museale landschap in Vlaanderen op stelten. Grootschalige fusies worden voorbereid, maar vooral één ingreep lokt storm uit: de onverwachte degradatie van het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA).The 25 Defining Art Events of 2025
ARTnews - 2 Décembre 2025 - 15h0920 - Flemish Government Votes to Eliminate Famed Antwerp Museum It’s not every day that a museum will close for seemingly no reason at all. But that’s exactly what apparently happened this year when the Flemish government decided it would gut Antwerp’s M HKA, Belgium’s oldest contemporary art museum. The government did not cite financial troubles as the cause for the closure, though it had recently denied the institution’s plans to build a new €130 million building. Instead, the decision came as part of a restructuring of Flemish cultural institutions that would create three “clusters” of museums and more evenly spread out the region’s cultural offerings. As part of the change, which is expected to take two years and be completed by 2028, M HKA’s collection of some 8,000 objects, many of which trace the importance of Antwerp in the development of 20th-century art, will be transferred to S.M.A.K. in Ghent, with the M HKA’s building essentially being transformed into a Kunsthalle-style organization. Two museum groups as well as artists like Luc Tuymans spoke out against the decision and called for the government to reverse it. —Maximilíano Durón
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