New Building for Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art (VMHK) in Antwerp

Abstract

MHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp seek to change its current building and re-establish itself on the wide arena of cultural institutions in Antwerp. Museum has a complex history, from its roots in the anti-museum of the ICC, via the “kunsthalle with a collection” up to today’s aspirations to be a part of a network of regional museums and seeking to take its place within a global context.

The layers of critique inherent in this trajectory are evident in the counterpoints established in the clients brief for the proposed museum: questions of material, abstraction, scale, and scenography underpin an oscillation between what it describes as anti-museum fascinations and technical museum requirements. Underpinning this are fundamental questions about contemporary art’s history and its relation to wider questions of culture, society and the world of art and artistic practice, embodied in its attitude to the very idea of the museum.

The MHKA's legend was built on contacts with avant- garde movements in art of the 1950s and 1960s, such as minimal and conceptual art. Their most prominent representative was Gordon Matta Clark, who worked in Antwerp at the time and whose artworks formed the foundation of the museum's current collection. Initially informal, the movement became institutionalized over time in the form of the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC), and decades later the Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp (MHKA) became its successor. The planned construction of the new museum also involves renaming the institution the Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art (VMHK).

The duality between the avant-garde past and the institutional present is an important part of the museum's identity. How does one think about the setting of the Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art in a way that respects its critical history and context in which it operates?