A plan by the Flemish government to dissolve M HKA, a beloved contemporary art institution in Antwerp, has come under further fire, with a legal review initiated by the museum now claiming that such a move would be illegal.
VRT News, a Belgian outlet, reported that M HKA had worked with several artists to bring on lawyers to look over the plan. The results of that review were presented to the press on Tuesday, with well-known artists such as Luc Tuymans and Otobong Nkanga on hand at the conference.
M HKA said in a release that the government’s plan contained “flagrant illegalities.” The plan, revealed in October of last year, would see the M HKA essentially closed down, with its collection sent to Ghent and its programming transferred to the Flemish Museum of Contemporary and Current Art, a rebranded version of the S.M.A.K. museum, in 2028. The current M HKA building would then be turned into an arts center that hosts artists and exhibitions.
Such a move is being positioned as a moment of reform for the Flemish art scene by the regional government. Although it is still in the proposal stage, the plan is being reviewed as though it were already signed into action, according to the M HKA. An official decision from the Flemish government is expected to arrive later this week.
“When non-binding documents are treated as if they were established policy, the legal certainty of a public institution is jeopardized,” Dieter Vankeirsbilck, acting director of M HKA, said in a statement. “That is precisely what this legal opinion reveals today.”
In a statement to VRT News, Caroline Gennez, the culture minister of Flanders, said she was aware of “difficulties and concerns” regarding the M HKA transition, but she appeared to stand by the proposal. “A two-year transition process for the reform will begin soon,” she said. “During this process, everyone involved will be able to participate in the decision-making process and its implementation, as planned.”
Museum organizations across the world have already sharply condemned the Flemish government, though the M HKA release from Tuesday was accompanied by denouncements from institutional directors that had not previously been made public.
“At a time when public interest in contemporary art continues to grow, and the number of museums is expanding internationally, the closure of a museum such as M HKA would represent an irreparable loss – not only for Antwerp, but for the entire cultural field,” reads an email sent in October to Gennez by more than a dozen European museum directors. Among the signatories are Maria Balshaw, the outgoing director of Tate Modern in London; Laurent Le Bon, of the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and Taco Dibbets, of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The release also included an email from artist Anish Kapoor from November that was not previously public. In that email to Gennez, Kapoor demanded the removal of his art from the websites of M HKA and all other Flemish museums. “This issue is not only about protecting my artistic legacy, but also about upholding the integrity of the institutions responsible for safeguarding cultural heritage,” Kapoor wrote.
Kapoor appears not to have been the only artist to make such a request. In an op-ed for the Art Newspaper today, curator Charles Esche reported that Emilia Kabakov and the estate of Christian Boltanski had sought the removal of their works from the M HKA website. Kabakov confirmed she had asked for the removal of her work to ARTnews. The Boltanski estate did not immediately respond to request for comment, but a prior release from a group known as Artists at Risk noted that the protests against the plan had the “support” of the estate via artist Annette Messager, Boltanski’s widow.)
Otobong Nkanga, an Antwerp-based artist, has similarly voiced her opposition to the change, via a video statement posted by M HKA, which mounted her first show in Belgium. She called the plan to relocate her work from Antwerp “unacceptable.”
“I think, and I believe, that M HKA should stay a museum,” she said. “It’s very important that we fight for this because it’s our museum, it’s our city, and it’s open to many other people. Families come, artists come. We look at works, we learn a lot, we share. This is such an important place for the different communities that are in Antwerp, the region, in Belgium, and also outside, internationally.”
In his op-ed, Esche warned that the ramifications of M HKA’s dissolution may extend beyond Antwerp. Whereas European nations allowed “cultural institutions and collections to find their resonance over time” starting in the 1960s, Esche wrote, now their principles “are dissolving into populist, neoliberal and politically clueless fragments. The case of the disappearing museum is therefore unlikely to be confined to Antwerp.”
