In de media

Hier vind je een overzicht van media-aandacht rond de beslissing van en de strijd tegen het besluit van de Vlaamse regering om het M HKA te ontdoen van zijn status als museum en zijn collectie. De pers volgt de weerstand tegen deze culturele afbraak op de voet.

• KMSKA wijst museumplan van minister Gennez af: "Wij willen onze rol blijven spelen en dat wordt moeilijk gemaakt"

  VRT - 17 December 2025 - 10:20
  Het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA) wijst het museumplan van Vlaams minister van Cultuur Caroline Gennez (Vooruit) af. "Wij willen onze rol blijven spelen en dat wordt moeilijk gemaakt", zegt voorzitter Luk Lemmens. Het museum wil de huidige brede programmatie kunnen behouden.

• ‘Over our dead body’: KMSKA verzet zich tegen museumplan van cultuurminister Gennez

  De Morgen - 17 December 2025 - 03:00
  Het Antwerpse KMSKA weigert de rol die het toebedeeld krijgt in het museumplan van Vlaams minister van Cultuur Caroline Gennez (Vooruit). Dat blijkt uit een nota die onze redactie kon inkijken. Als het KMSKA voet bij stuk houdt, mag het museumplan als dood worden beschouwd.

• Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Response from Els Silvrants-Barclay

  Afterall - 17 December 2025
  First, we must dare to acknowledge that M HKA indeed faced significant challenges in its museological functions – ranging from basic caretaking, such as collection registration and storage, to broader substantive questions regarding acquisition, display, and dissemination. These issues were repeatedly noted in evaluation reports, yet, frankly, they were also an open secret. In that sense, as a community, we could and should have spoken up earlier.

• Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven and Tamara Beheydt

  Afterall - 15 December 2025 - 00:04
  When the government invests money in a museum to enable a new initiative or a challenging project, it does so in the belief that developing new infrastructure meets a need. That need may be imposed from above (to support an ideology or political agenda) or arise from below (for example, from a number of people who have already put their shoulders to the wheel of an initiative that has organically grown into something bigger).

• Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Dieter Roelstraete

  Afterall - 15 December 2025 - 00:03
  What is so singularly depressing about the political farce surrounding the proposed dismantling of M HKA is that the invoked logic of economic rationalisation still appears to have so much pull in political discourse. Haven’t the countless disasters of populist economics’ experiments with ‘austerity’ taught us anything? (The global political polycrisis is nothing other than the smouldering ruin of one such experiment in enforcing one austerity too many.) Indeed, it is utterly dispiriting that we find ourselves once again called upon to defend the various spaces of art as economically legitimate in their own right – and the fact that so many have so quickly and so vocally rallied to M HKA’s defence (even those relatively critical of that institution’s various perceived shortcomings) makes it abundantly clear that the vast majority of interested parties simply no longer buy the tired old canard of so-called ‘rationalisation’ – the last of the tenets of neoliberalism to go the way of the dodo. It is precisely this disconnect which unmasks the ministerial measure as the deeply undemocratic coup that it really is. None of us could have imagined that, in the year 2025 (of all years!), one must still come to the defence of art; and although most of us are beyond exhausted by the realisation that we have to do so regardless, we’ll rise to the challenge anyway. That in itself is a uniquely powerful indictment of the retrograde error of ‘their’ ways – as is the sobering fact that, as far as I can tell, absolutely no one seems to really want this move to happen anyway. And those who don’t care… simply don’t care.

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

  Afterall - 15 December 2025 - 00:02
  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 - 00:01
  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 - 15:33
  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
  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.