Flemish Government’s Plan to Dismantle M HKA’s Collection in the Name of Centralization of Art

Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA)

By Alexandra Kharchenko

On October 6, 2025, the Flemish Government announced plans to transform the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) into a Kunsthalle^[1]— a center for art — which would lead the museum to lose its legal status as a museum and transfer its collection to the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), located in Ghent. Losing this status will have huge legal, financial, and cultural repercussions for the M HKA. In the same announcement, the government decided to postpone the long-approved project to construct a new building adjacent to the museum.

Those controversial decisions were reportedly a shock not only for the M HKA staff but also for many cultural institutions, organizations, and galleries as public funding for the arts is in decline and increasingly precarious. These concerns were expressed in open letters and petitions which included the Artistic Freedom Initiative,^[2] the Board of L’Internationale Confederation,^[3] Hans Ulrich Obrist,^[4] artistic director of Serpentine Galleries in London, Maria Balshaw, outgoing director of the U.K.’s Tate, Laurent Le Bon, director of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Taco Dibbets, director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.^[5]