Copyright Atelier Kanal
This past spring, an eclectic mix of journalists donned hard hats and dusty boots to join Kasia Redzisz, the artistic director of the Kanal-Centre Pompidou in Brussels, on a tour through the institution’s colossal former Citroën garage from the 1930s ahead of its long-awaited reopening. After a crisis-ridden decade of planning and renovations and more than €250 million ($290 million), the 430,000-square-foot complex is set to open on November 28, when it will become the Belgian capital city’s only major modern and contemporary art museum.
Bordering the low-income neighborhood of Molenbeek, the Art Deco structure is known for its 90-foot-high glass façade. Looking down from inside the cavernous glass showroom, with its four floors removed, the space recalls the nave-like Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. But Redzisz, who previously worked as a curator at Tate Modern, matter-of-factly pointed out why that comparison is inaccurate. “Turbine Hall is a destination, with an entrance; here everything is a passage, so it’s very different,” she said during the tour.
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The layout of Kanal is also quite different: two streets intersect its campus, and over 215,000 square feet of it—including workshops, libraries, an auditorium, a cinema, a café and restaurant, a rooftop bar, a bakery, and a playground designed by the Turner Prize–winning collective Assemble—are all ticket-free, forming what the museum calls a “city within a city.” Another 85,000 square feet are for offices, tech facilities and storage, while 130,000 square feet are dedicated to exhibition spaces. A portion of the latter is curated with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as part of a renewable partnership that expires in 2031. All told, Brussels’s new Kanal is in fact much larger than the original Tate Modern.
Per their agreement, the Pompidou has about 21,500 square feet in which to collaborate on semi-permanent displays every 18 months, mainly drawn from its collection. Plus, it will contribute works to additional temporary shows. Meanwhile, Kanal is slowly building its own, budding collection with an annual budget of €250,000 ($290,350); it currently numbers about 100 objects.
But not everyone has been thrilled about such an ambitious art museum coming to the European capital city.
To balance this year’s €957 million ($1.1 billion) projected deficit for the Brussels-Capital Region government, lawmakers announced plans earlier this year to slash its funding of Kanal to €10 million ($11.5 million) annually starting in 2029, down from the original €35 million ($40 million). The cuts have already progressively begun, with the current budget of €28 million dropping to €24 million in 2027, and €22 million in 2028. They also echo broader austerity measures across Brussels’ municipal, regional, and federal governing systems, which have impacted everything from drug-prevention services to art institutions and now-shuttered tourist offices. In Kanal’s case, they threaten the future of the museum as it was initially conceived.
This looming financial blow to the museum is bolstered by long-standing accusations that Kanal was a poorly planned vanity project initiated in 2013 by Socialist Party leaders, who lost dominance of the city’s regional coalition government in June 2024, though they have managed to hold onto a close second place as a coalition governing partner. The center-right, francophone Mouvement Réformateur (MR) party now leads the seven-party coalition government, after over 600 days spent in deadlock without a government.
“There is a political will to see this project through—whatever it costs,” Gaëtan Van Goidsenhoven, a center-right MR member of the Belgian parliament, told ARTnews. If Kanal doesn’t manage to find an alternative to “hyper-dependence” on public subsidies, however, “the risk is that this immense ship accumulates disappointments, empty spaces, periods of closure, all of which will obviously have very major repercussions on a project that, to guarantee its ambition, must have very high attendance and needs to be open permanently.”
Van Goidsenhoven added, “We set the bar very high.”
How Much Could a Museum Cost?
Some critics of the budget cuts argue that the bar may be high but merited, given what the museum has to offer Brussels in terms of art, direct and indirect employment, and revitalizing the surrounding, low-income neighborhood. Yves Goldstein, Kanal’s founding general director, believes the proposed funding drop presents an existential threat to the museum, and hopes lawmakers will reconsider their current budget. “The reality is that [for] the museum that we built, of course it’s not possible to do it with €10 million,” he said, noting that the building alone costs about €10 million a year to maintain and secure.
Kanal recently won a €60 million government loan to finalize construction, and it has one year to pay it back. A portion of that money will be used to repair damage to the roof of one of its buildings from a fire that broke out in early July in the air conditioning system. (The cause of the fire in the new building dedicated to Kanal Architecture, formerly called the International Centre for the City, Architecture and Landscape (CIVA), is still undetermined.) Goldstein said it was the “cherry on top of the complexities and difficulties that we’ve met over these last 10 years.” Or to use a French expression, the protracted job was not unlike a chemin de croix (“cross to bear”), he said, half-joking.
The delays are indeed numerous. Beyond the current budget crisis and government-less period, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine added €40 million ($46 million) to the initial projected cost of €150 million ($173 million) to renovate the Citroën campus. An early setback began when, rather than renovate, Atelier Kanal designers—a team consisting of the architectural offices EM2N, noAarchitecten, and Sergison Bates—had to erect three new, temperature-controlled buildings, or “boxes within boxes,” to house exhibitions on art and architecture, as well as offices and an auditorium, when the existing structure, with its vast, open spaces, proved unsuitable to actually display most artworks. Some of Kanal’s underground galleries also kept filling with water that had to be pumped back into the nearby canal. And much of the metal foundation supporting the building’s central glass showroom had deteriorated to the point of becoming unstable.
Another significant, though supporters say fair, expense is the museum’s partnership with the Pompidou, which costs a total of €12 million or €2 million annually for five years until 2031, plus nearly €2 million for an early preparatory and consulting phase, including the “Kanal Brut” pre-opening exhibition from May 2018 to June 2019.
Local detractors of the partnership include leaders of other Belgian cultural institutions, like Dirk Snauwaert, director of the Wiels contemporary art center in Brussels. He sees it as a French-first initiative that is closely tied to government cultural policies, which risk overshadowing Belgium’s art scene, despite efforts to include Belgian artists in Kanal’s programming. He added that the Pompidou is “extracting financial means from regions like Brussels, which is virtually broke.”
Pompidou director Julie Narbey refuted those accusations, saying that the Pompidou has “curatorial and artistic independence” from the French government and that her institution’s involvement comes down to “partnerships with a friend.” She insisted the Pompidou is “not taking root” and “establishing itself in Brussels.” Narbey also characterized the €12 million licensing fee as “not very expensive,” though she noted that it is helping to finance the Pompidou’s major renovation, which has closed the museum for five years. Redzisz, Kanal’s artistic director, similarly defended the partnership, saying “we run an autonomous program of temporary shows, curated mostly in-house or by guest curators.”
Claire Leblanc, director of the Ixelles Museum in Brussels, said Kanal’s troubles reflect a lack of coordination and common vision with the local art scene. She, too, is at work on reopening a small modern and contemporary art museum: the 135-year-old Ixelles has been closed for renovations for the past nine years and will reopen in March. But she hopes for a positive outcome for Kanal. “They’ve gone so far that I really wish them success,” said Leblanc. “We can’t imagine that the region could have given so much money for something that doesn’t work out in the end. That’s just not possible.”
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Shifting Priorities
Jan Wostyn, an economist who has written about Brussels politics and finances, believes the Kanal project was too grandiose to begin with. “Some in the political class felt this absolute urge to put Brussels on the map in a big way, and that’s a thing that you often have with Brussels politicians: They always look at Paris … but they forget that Brussels does not have the means and size of Paris.”
Snauwaert agreed, characterizing Kanal as the product of a “megalomaniacal” political initiative by francophone authorities. (Brussels has separate Dutch- and French-speaking political parties). He worries the cumbersome “mega-structure” will “drain so much money into infrastructural means” that instead of actually funding the arts ecosystem in Brussels, the money will “go into keeping that machine going [so as] to not lose face.”
Kanal is the only cultural institution currently receiving significant subsidies from the Brussels-Capital Region, which typically does not fund the arts. (This does not count a now abandoned museum project dedicated to illustrator Philippe Geluck’s cat cartoons, itself plagued by skyrocketing construction costs, nor Kanal Architecture, formerly CIVA.) Private funding, along with projections for ticket sales and other revenue generated onsite, will round out Kanal’s budget. Other cultural institutions often receive a mix of public funding from the federal to the local commission levels. The BCR’s exception made for Kanal, with financial backing that dwarfs the operating costs of other institutions—Wiels runs on €2.5 million to €2.6 million annually—has added tensions within the local art community, according to multiple sources interviewed for this article.
The Brussels governing system is notoriously splintered along linguistic communities, which is one reason the Brussels-Capital Region failed to form a new government between June 2024 and February 2026. Kanal has borne the brunt of these rifts and was kept in financial limbo during those nearly two lame-duck years.
Even still, Goldstein, Kanal’s general director, argued that “Brussels needs to have this kind of institution.” Without a major modern and contemporary art museum, he said there is “a real lack in the ecosystem,” which is otherwise vibrant. Prior to his role at Kanal, Goldstein served as chief of staff to former Minister-President of the Brussels-Capital Region, Rudi Vervoort, a francophone member of the Socialist Party. Goldstein plans to step down from Kanal after it opens, having accomplished his mission.
“We did our best to build a museum that is different, not only in Brussels, but even in Europe, and maybe the world,” he said, pointing to Kanal’s goal “to attract people who think that museums are not for them, which is the large majority of our population, and to lead them toward a kind of ownership of a museum, which is the biggest challenge that we have.”
Nevertheless, given the museum’s precarious finances, the move has raised some questions. If the budget hadn’t been slashed, “I’d say he’d have been keener to stay on,” said Wostyn. But with the current outlook, Goldstein knows the next manager will “have to optimize every possible income and cost and find private sector partners— that was not his vision for this project.”
Finding the Money
The Kanal team is currently searching for alternative investment and looking into event-space rental opportunities as a way to stymie the expected loss of €25 million ($29 million) in funding. So far, they have secured some commercial privatization and sponsorships, including hiring out event space for founding sponsor ING Belgium. The museum anticipates 100 to 200 private hire events per year; added to other resources such as ticket sales, food and beverages, they are targeting at least €15 million ($17.3 million) in revenue. Tickets cost €24 for adults who want access to all art shows, including the temporary exhibition. It expects to welcome between 400,000 and 500,000 visitors per year.
In late August, Kanal’s team also met with officials from Kazakhstan and agreed to begin collaborating with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Almaty by October, “with a view to Kanal receiving payment for its services,” such as curatorial exchanges and joint exhibitions, according to a representative from the Brussels museum. It is still unclear how much they would receive from the private museum or the Kazakh government.
Goldstein thinks even Kanal’s staunchest critics will change their tune come November. “The first step—after so many years of criticism, of problems—is to open,” he said, arguing that the financial future of the museum, including its real expenses and revenue, can’t be accurately determined until the institution is open.
Kanal’s inaugural 10 exhibitions showcasing over 250 artists remain “rooted in a local context,” according to Redzisz. They include several shows that will highlight Belgium-based artists, such as “NO SHOW,” curated by artist duo Deborah Bowmann (Amaury Daurel and Victor Delestre), and Maoupa Mazzocchetti; “La première fois” (The first time), featuring a light and sound installation by Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Christoph Fink; “Blindsight,” a sound work by Manon de Boer; Joshua Serafin’s new film installation, Whispering pleas of the eternal echoes; and “Département des Pièges: Metabolic Museum-University,” which includes loans from Brussels museums combining historical artifacts and contemporary works, as well as paintings by Belgian and international artists from the 17th to the 21st centuries, such as Kasper Bosmans and Guillaume Bijl. Additionally, Antwerp-based Otobong Nkanga was commissioned to make a site-specific, large-scale installation.
Another highlight is the show “An infinite woman: Black archives in two acts,” which excavates the Citroën company’s historic financing of colonial propaganda, notably through depictions of African Mangbetu women. That imagery is then subverted by contemporary artists of African descent, including the Belgian-based Agneskena and Agnes Lalau, paired with international artists such as Simone Leigh, Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, and Barbara Walker.
The largest exhibition, titled “A truly immense journey,” however, features 350 works from the 1900s to the present, largely from the Pompidou and complemented by contributions from Kanal’s collection, plus private and public Belgian collections. Artists include Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Lygia Clark, Sonia Delaunay, and Wilfredo Lam, with works gathered around the theme of movement and migration, whether it be people or ideas.
All things considered, Goldstein is still optimistic about Kanal, seeing the project as “a breakthrough for Brussels” that will bridge two different parts of the city, which he said is “necessary in this time of more [political] radicalization.” By the end of 2027, he said, “let’s see if there’s a kind of Guggenheim effect.”