While the Flemish fine arts collection finally lands again in the extensively renovated KMSKA (Royal Museum of Fine Arts), the Flemish community has also started up the next infrastructural leap that will raise the Flemish museum landscape up to a more international level. As previously announced, it will realise a new building dedicated to contemporary art for M HKA, the second cultural heritage institution of the Flemish Community. A new architectural contest for this will be launched later this year. The future building will allow for the collection of contemporary art to become more visible and more located within a consistent narrative.
M HKA is already beginning the important work in anticipation of its new museum building, which will include substantial permanent collection displays. With this in mind, M HKA complements the festive reopening of its sister institution with an indication of what is yet to come. Visitors to the reopened KMSKA this autumn will also be able to visit a major temporary exhibition with 24 pieces of a future puzzle ̶ 24 key international artistic figures ̶ that may be presented later in the new Flemish contemporary art museum.
Focusing on an expanded image of the museum’s collection, the exhibition seeks to reflect its longer-term aspirations by presenting the work of several artists that are already considered strongholds within the collection alongside artists the museum intends to search for ways to include, or strengthen the presence of, in the years to come. Alongside the grande finale of a decade of renovation of KMSKA, this exhibition at M HKA announces the beginning of a new trajectory.
The exhibition is named after a key book on the particular praxis of contemporary art museums, Museum in Motion, as this is the specific reflection that will be undertaken in the years to come. The museum will have to develop its historiography alongside the building process. The opening of this conversation consists of a concise selection made collectively by M HKA’s artistic and collection teams of two dozen artists of which they believe should become part of our frames of reference. Some of the usual suspects are absent here because they’re so much an acknowledged part of the reference frames already. Presented across both main floors of the museum, this is rather a first ambitious, indicative prefiguration, opening up a reflection that will continue as the new building too takes shape.
Artists: Etel Adnan, Marcel Broodthaers, Lili Dujourie, Marlene Dumas, Jimmie Durham, Andrea Fraser, Yang Fudong, Shilpa Gupta, Dorothy Iannone, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Nikita Kadan, Yayoi Kusama, Taus Makhacheva, Gordon Matta-Clark, Hana Miletić, Laure Prouvost, Walter Swennen, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Otobong Nkanga, Nicola L, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Allan Sekula, Nicolás Uriburu, Haegue Yang
