M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, has announced its 2026 programme.
It is structured in three seasonal chapters that a spokesman said “reflect the museum’s long-standing commitment to artist-centred thinking, contemporary urgency, and public encounter.”
With a programme spanning emerging practices, historic avant-garde legacies and key international voices, M HKA has positioned 2026 as a year of “artistic resilience, political imagination, and social relevance. Without sacrificing accessibility.”
Nav Haq, Artistic Director M HKA, said, “There is a unique story that is not well-known enough about M HKA.”
“Whilst many art museums historically were founded by individual patrons, who often accumulated their vast wealth through colonial extraction (think Tate, Museum Ludwig, Van Abbemuseum, etc.), it was in fact artists that played the fundamental role in the foundation of M HKA.
“Artists donated their artworks to form the foundations of a collection for a new institution in Antwerp. Eventually the Flemish Community decided to found M HKA as the first contemporary art museum in Belgium, which opened its doors in 1987. It has considered itself an artist-centred museum ever since.
“Our programme for 2026 continues to exemplify this position.”
“Alongside exhibitions that offer the opportunity to engage with key artistic practices – from emerging figures to pioneers of the historical avant-garde, from the locally-rooted to the multipolar world – we also seek to address some of the serious hot-button concerns affecting artists today. Our exhibitions will address the cruelty of censorship and the inequality that artists face, as well as reflecting in various ways on the failures of political imagination these things are symptomatic of.”
Haq added, “Indeed, M HKA seeks to create the most optimal meeting point possible for our publics to engage with not only world-class artistic practices, but with their deeply relevant perspectives on society.
“2027 will be a milestone year in which M HKA celebrates its 40th birthday. In the lead up, our programme this year will be one that offers our communities a vital space for reflecting not only on the role of artists and cultural institutions in society, but also on what must be done to ensure the sustainability of their practices in the face of a turbulent political climate,” added Haq.
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