Flemish Primitivism: An Expat’s Musings on the Proposed Closing of Antwerp’s M HKA

Two days before the opening of the itinerant 2025 Kyiv Biennial at the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in October—a signal event in the otherwise dire doomscape of the contemporary-art-and-politics nexus, and one that has since won Kyiv Biennial founder Vasyl Cherepanyn the artistic directorship of the next Berlin Biennial—Flemish minister of culture Caroline Gennez, completely unexpectedly and apparently without consulting any of the parties concerned, unveiled an ambitious new plan entailing a radical reorganization of Flanders’s institutional ecosystem that, in just over two years’ time, aims to result in the closing of M HKA.