A proposal by the Flemish government to Belgium’s oldest museum dedicated to contemporary art has spurred widespread controversy in the Belgian art scene.Earlier this week, the Flemish government, which manages the mostly Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium, said it had “decided to thoroughly reform the landscape of its own museums and the visual arts sector in Flanders.” The decision came after a recent assessment on the region’s museum landscape, with the aim of providing a “more logical distribution” of the region’s public collections.As part of this change, which will begin next year and be completed by 2028, S.M.A.K. in Ghent will become the Flemish Museum of Contemporary and Current Art. The collection of the Antwerp’s M HKA (an acronym for the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp in Dutch) will be transferred to that new museum, and its its holdings will be moved to Ghent.Founded in 1985, the M HKA is the oldest contemporary art museum in Belgium, predating S.M.A.K. by more than a decade. Its collection now numbers around 8,000 objects, and it is known for closely watched exhibition program, featuring a mix of single-artist surveys and group exhibition. Recent shows include solos for Nástio Mosquito (in 2024), Dorothy Iannone (2023), and Anthea Hamilton (2022), as well as the 2024 exhibition “The Lives of Animals.” The museum is currently hosting the Kyiv Biennial 2025 and a survey of Pauline Curnier Jardin, with a major Nicola L. retrospective is planned for 2026.S.M.A.K., which has a collection of some 3,000 works from the postwar era to today, will also take over M HKA’s mission to present contemporary art, while M HKA’s current building will be transformed into an arts center that will stage exhibitions, as well as host studios, residencies, and other programming—seemingly adopting the Kunsthalle model that is prominent in several other European countries. Similarly, the Centre for Art Archives Flanders, which is housed at M HKA, “will also be repositioned in the field,” according to the release.On Tuesday, the day after the new museum plan was announced, M HKA’s board chairman Herman De Bode resigned after eight years. According to a report by Art Dependence Magazine, he said, “The decision taken by the Flemish government to behead the M HKA, at the suggestion of the Minister of Culture, is too crazy for words. This happened without any participation from anyone on our side. I think that’s criminal. I have no other words for it.”Bode said that what makes M HKA unique as an institution is “tied to our history. You can relocate some works of art, but you don’t really move anything with that. You cannot export the avant-garde to Ghent. It’s Antwerp.”“Flemish museums can be proud of their collections,” Flemish culture minister Caroline Gennez told Belga New Agency. “But in order to get more out of those collections and realise the ambitions of scaling up and internationalisation, more cooperation is needed.”These decisions seem to have been made without input from the respective institutions. The M HKA has published an open letter, written by its employees and addressed to Gennez, about “this insane plan,” which they say was done without “speak[ing] to us personally in Antwerp” and done without transparency. The letter includes a link to a petition, titled “⚠️Call for Mass Protest:⚠️ Keep the M HKA collection in Antwerp!” on the site openPetition; by Wednesday, it had garnered more than 2,200 signatures.The aim of the letter, the employees write, is to “express our concern about the recent policy decisions concerning the future of our museum, which we first learned about in the press on Friday and then on Monday. … We feel not only completely surprised, but also shocked and even insulted by your plans, the way they were developed, and the communication about them.”In her comments to Belga, Gennez said that “the M HKA has been struggling with its role as a museum for some time, as confirmed once again by the recent evaluation.”Likely in response to this comment, the M HKA’s open letter reads, “Despite all its challenges, the Muhka is a unique place in Flanders where the critical and social potential of contemporary visual art is fully expressed. Ambiguity and complexity are given space there; beauty and meaning are not reduced to clear-cut messages or sound bites. In this way, the museum fulfills a crucial role within the cultural landscape – not as a showcase or tourist attraction, but as a space for reflection, imagination, and dialogue.”The news comes a week after the Flemish government announced that it would cancel a planned a new building for the M HKA that was estimated to cost €130 million (around $151 million). That new building had been in the works for nearly a decade; a 2020 architecture competition was abandoned, with a new one beginning in 2023. The museum had announced in February that two firms, Bovenbouw Architectuur and Christ & Gantenbein, had been selected to design the building.In a report by Belga on October 3, Gennez said, “130 million euros is a huge amount of money and an enormous responsibility. As a government, we must ensure that taxpayers’ money is well spent.” The Flemish government’s release announcing these changes states that “[t]he funds released from the new construction project will be used in part to support Flemish museums in their transitions and future operations.” Among these is a planned renovation of M HKA’s current building.The M HKA open letter also addressed the transfer of its collection in-depth, stating that doing so “insufficiently considers the expertise already acquired, the connection between the collection, context, and audience, and the need for stable and well-equipped infrastructure,” as well as disregards the museum’s acquisition strategy which sees “city of Antwerp as a gateway to the world.”So far, those affiliated with M HKA aren’t the only ones to speak out against the Flemish government’s new vision for the region’s museums. According to the Art Dependence report, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans said of the decision, “I am angry. We must not forget that the M HKA was the very first museum of contemporary art in Belgium. The whole neighborhood was also built around it. This is a real loss of face for an important city like Antwerp.”The transfer of M HKA’s collection to S.M.A.K. is part of the government’s reimaging of its museums into three clusters, each led by one museum (called a “beacon”). For contemporary art, the forthcoming Flemish Museum of Contemporary and Current Art will serve as the beacon.The other two clusters do not have as dramatic a change. Serving as the beacon institution for fine arts, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA) in Antwerp will now oversee the Hof van Busleyden Museum in Mechelen and the Gaasbeek Castle in Lennik. As the beacon for “Modern art and Belgian masters (1850–present),” the Mu.ZEE in Ostend will now be in charge of the Roger Raveel Museum in Zulte and the FeliX Art+Eco Museum in Drogenbos.“The three beacons are tasked with jointly developing a comprehensive collection vision for the Flemish Community Collection,” the release said of the latter consolidation. “The museums complement each other, are better distributed and are growing together into museums as described in the new international definition of ICOM.”