M HKA: The slow unravelling of Antwerp

Antwerp likes to think of itself as a city that wears its culture lightly but securely: old masters rubbing shoulders with new ideas, tradition accommodating experiment without surrendering its core. That self-image has taken a sharp knock with the Flemish government’s decision to dismantle the city’s oldest contemporary art museum, M HKA, and fold its collection into an institution based elsewhere. What is being lost is not merely bricks, mortar or storage space, but something harder to quantify and far more difficult to replace.