Media Coverage

This page provides an overview of media coverage on the Flemish government’s decision to and the fight against stripping M HKA of its museum status and collection.The press is closely tracking the resistance to this cultural dismantling.

• Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Hicham Khalidi

  Afterall - 15 December 2025 - 12:02 am
  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.

• Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Pascal Gielen

  Afterall - 15 December 2025 - 12:01 am
  The 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

  Afterall - 15 December 2025
  A 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.

• Inspectie Financiën vernietigend over stopzetten nieuwbouw M HKA: ‘Geen enkele onderbouwing’

  De Morgen - 12 December 2025 - 3:33 pm
  Na 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 December 2025 - 12:00 pm
  Suite 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.

• Flemish Primitivism: An Expat’s Musings on the Proposed Closing of Antwerp’s M HKA

  Mousse Magazine - 11 December 2025
  Two days before the opening of the itinerant 2025 Kyiv Biennial at the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in October—a signal event in the otherwise dire doomscape of the contemporary-art-and-politics nexus, and one that has since won Kyiv Biennial founder Vasyl Cherepanyn the artistic directorship of the next Berlin Biennial—Flemish minister of culture Caroline Gennez, completely unexpectedly and apparently without consulting any of the parties concerned, unveiled an ambitious new plan entailing a radical reorganization of Flanders’s institutional ecosystem that, in just over two years’ time, aims to result in the closing of M HKA.

• Als Antwerpen zijn museum van hedendaagse kunst verliest…

  M HKA Magazine - 10 December 2025 - 10:14 am
  De hertekening van het Vlaamse museumlandschap kan ingrijpende gevolgen hebben voor Antwerpen. Als het M HKA zijn museale status verliest, dreigt de stad een van haar belangrijkste culturele instellingen te verzwakken. Wat vandaag op tafel ligt, raakt verschillende domeinen: cultuur, economie, en internationale positie en uitstraling.

• AFI - Open Letter M HKA Minister of Culture Caroline Gennez

  Artistic Freedom Initiative - 8 December 2025 - 10:00 am
  Artistic 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 December 2025 - 2:29 pm
  De 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 December 2025 - 3:09 pm
  20 - 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