Kanal art museum unveils 10 exhibitions for November opening amid ongoing financial uncertainty

Brussels’ landmark cultural project Kanal has outlined 10 upcoming exhibitions it is staging for the long-awaited opening on 28 November.

The inaugural multidisciplinary programme includes works by Picasso, Mondrian and Matisse, alongside Brussels and Belgian artists exploring themes such as migration and colonial history.

Kanal’s director general Yves Goldstein confidently presented the programme at a press conference on Wednesday. “In 304 days, Kanal will cease to be a (pipe) dream, a mirage, a utopia. It will reveal itself in all its dimensions – those of an extraordinary museum for an extraordinary city, those of an ambitious museum in a city too often lacking in ambition.”

Transforming the former Citroën garage, an iconic Art Deco building in Place Sainctelette, into a 40,000m² flagship museum space has proved not only to be ambitious, but financially perilous, hampered by the Brussels-Capital Region’s inability to form a government.

Goldstein acknowledged that the future modern and contemporary arts complex still needed an additional €50m to open. While the total cost of the project has now reached €230m, Brussels’ government has contributed the sum of €193m.

In response to his own questions about the role and purpose of Kanal, he pointedly responded: “Nothing, if the public authorities do not allow the development of this creative space, which should be protected against the stifling pressures of the marketplace and the breakneck tempo of the media.”

Honouring its iconic architecture

In addition to showcasing contemporary art via a collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the museum is firmly placing its own emblematic architecture and identity centre stage.

Inside the former garage, three towers will house the five-storey Kanal museum and an underground gallery, as well as the Kanal Architecture space, complete with a library, study area, bookshop and auditorium.

A vast expanse is earmarked for unprogrammed public space, offering a meeting place and access areas to all the different exhibition halls.  

The soaring glass-fronted former showroom of the garage that symbolically faces the city centre is designed to be the public face of the museum. It is topped by a restaurant and a roof terrace with panoramic views of the capital. Kanal will also offer a bakery, a 700m² playground and a printing house.

Exhibition programme

One of the ambitions of Kanal since its launch as a project in 2018, has been to present its own art collection. This growing body of work reflects the city’s artistic heritage: historical figures from the Brussels art scene, including Jacqueline Mesmaeker and Walter Swennen, as well as Belgians and international artists who have established their careers here.

A truly immense journey assembles some 350 works from the museum's own collection, the Centre Pompidou and other Belgian public and private collections. Alongside works by Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, Giacometti and Lygia Clark are artists such as Jane Graverol (pictured above), Sammy Baloji, Edith Dekyndt and Luc Tuymans.

Another highlight is An Infinite Woman, a group show that takes the Citroën car brand’s colonial past as its starting point. The image of a woman from the Mangbetu people in the Congo became the emblem of the Black Cruise, an expedition across Africa that was organised by the company In 1925. The exhibition explores the image of the Mangbetu women and how artists of African descent invert that image and continue to reappropriate it.

Belgian-Nigerian visual artist Otobong Nkanga presents an installation that invites visitors to add their own personal stories; highlighting individual narratives as well as the frequently invisible labour and economic structures behind art institutions. Meanwhile, Brussels-based Filipino multidisciplinary artist Joshua Serafin delivers a solo show, Whispering Pleas of the Eternal Echoes, that is at the intersection of performance and film and probes migration and queerness (pictured below).

Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s solo exhibition La première fois consists of a sensory light installation inspired by the underground gallery in which it is sited. The Brussels multimedia artist considers themes of atmosphere, time and space. Another city artist, Manon De Boer, who is originally from the Netherlands, presents a sound installation, Blindsight, enhanced by video films (pictured below).

The exhibition Département des Pièges gathers objects and paintings from 11 different Brussels museums that tribute the surrealist artist Marcel Broodthaers in their ability to trap or lure onlookers. In the group exhibition NO SHOW, Deborah Bowmann, Maoupa Mazzocchetti and 20 other artists explore the role of museums in a light, sound and art performance.

For its showroom space, accessible to everyone, Kanal stages a work by Istanbul artist Banu Cennetoğlu that displays gold-coloured balloons in the form of bouquets; spelling out each of the 30 articles of the Declaration of Human Rights.

For artistic director Kasia Redzisz, Kanal “emerges in a city marked by artistic intensity and institutional absence: a place where contemporary practices have long flourished without a museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art.”

It also aims to be determinedly experimental with its shows. “The inaugural programme establishes Kanal as a place where exhibitions, collections, live practices and participatory processes are inseparable,” she adds.

Photos: ©Atelier Kanal; KANAL AK W Buyse; interior ©Atelier Kanal; A truly immense journey - Graverol-LAfrique inconnu, Decroos; An infinite woman - Barbara Walker; Joshua Serafin, Relics, HORST art and music, I Michiel Devijver; Blindsight - Manon de Boer