If Flanders loses M HKA

What is being questioned today is more than the future of a single institution. If Flanders loses M HKA as a museum, it loses a vital infrastructure for contemporary art: for international cooperation, long-term development, and public value.

This loss would not be loud. It would not arrive with a closure, or an empty building. It would unfold quietly, through the gradual dismantling of legitimacy, trust and capacity.

Without museum status, what disappears is not only a formal set of responsibilities, but access to networks that exist only between institutions recognised as equals. International co-productions, loans and shared research projects depend on mutual recognition. If Flanders no longer recognises M HKA as a museum, the world will eventually step back.

What Flanders would lose — in practical terms

International credibility

International partners work with museums because museums offer stability, ethical frameworks and continuity. Once that status is removed, Flanders shifts from an equal partner to a short-term project player.

The consequences are immediate: fewer international co-productions, less visibility for Flemish art in global circuits, and less influence within the international museum conversation.

And this kind of loss is hard to undo. Trust, once eroded, rarely returns by itself.

Long-term artistic development

M HKA has not merely presented artists. It has helped build trajectories: research, production, presentation and international circulation held together as one coherent practice. Without a museum infrastructure, that coherence breaks down. Artistic development becomes shorter-term, more fragile, and increasingly dependent on project logic.

This affects not only established names, but above all future generations of artists — for whom museums remain a crucial bridge between local practice and international breakthrough.

Public value and collective memory

A museum safeguards more than objects. It preserves context, knowledge and history. It offers a public framework in which art can be questioned, revisited and shared.

When an institution loses its museum role, the centre of gravity shifts from public responsibility to temporary production. The public becomes a spectator of something happening elsewhere, rather than a co-owner of a shared cultural memory.

That is not an abstract loss. It is a narrowing of the public sphere.

An anchor point in a fragmented landscape

Flanders’ arts ecosystem is rich — but it is also vulnerable, precisely because it is fragmented. Museums serve as anchor points: places of continuity, cooperation and long-term care.

Losing M HKA as a museum does not “create space”. It removes a stabilising force — at the very moment the field needs greater cohesion.

This is not an argument for preservation as a default. It is an argument about direction. The real choice is not between holding on to the past or embracing the future. The real choice is whether to build on existing strengths, or dismantle them.

M HKA is not a traditional museum resisting change. It has evolved into an open, hybrid and post-museum practice, bringing together collection, creation, research and the public within one shared field.

That is precisely why museum status is not an obstacle to renewal, but the condition that makes it possible.

What is truly at stake

If Flanders loses M HKA as a museum, it loses international parity, long-term artistic development, public responsibility for contemporary art, and an institution capable of connecting past, present and future. That loss is not temporary. It is structural.

And it does not affect M HKA alone. It affects everyone who believes that art is more than a project — that it carries public, shared and lasting value.