ANTWERP.- M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) announces its 2026 programme, structured in three seasonal chapters that 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 positions 2026 as a year of artistic resilience, political imagination, and social relevance. Without sacrificing accessibility.

M HKA, the artist-centred museum
By Nav Haq, Artistic Director M HKA

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.

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.

Highlights 2026

M HKA works in three seasons – spring, summer and autumn – with exhibitions and presentations changing three times a year. Each season opens with a festive launch event, underscoring M HKA’s belief that contemporary art gains meaning through shared experience and public dialogue. Save the dates: Thursday 12 March, 25 June and 12 November.

SPRING

we refuse_d
13 March – 7 June 2026

A group exhibition bringing together fifteen artists whose practices examine refusal, endurance and action under conditions shaped by censorship, silencing and erasure. Developed through ongoing dialogue between artists and curators, we refuse_d is positioned both as a collective statement and a space for solidarity.

Stef Van Looveren — COSMIC BODY. First Incision
IN SITU | 24 January – 17 May 2026

A new site-specific installation and performance in which the museum becomes a hybrid of temple, body and alchemical laboratory. Van Looveren foregrounds material transformation, melting, mirroring, reconfiguration, as a ritual and embodied approach to change, identity and queer non-binary imaginaries.

SUMMER

Nicola L. — When the Earth Turned the Other Way
26 June – 11 October 2026

M HKA presents the first major retrospective in Belgium dedicated to Nicola L., whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, film, painting and design. Featuring around 90 works, including the iconic Penetrables, the exhibition revisits her radical participatory aesthetics and her gender-conscious politics, situating her within international post-war avant-garde networks (including Fluxus and connections to Marcel Broodthaers).

Jean Katambayi Mukendi — RATIO
IN SITU | 26 June – 20 September 2026

Combining recent drawings with large-scale sculptures, RATIO addresses structural global inequalities in resource extraction and power distribution. Mukendi’s speculative constructions draw on technological systems – from agriculture to military applications and robotics – and propose alternative ecological and political imaginaries through reuse and reconfiguration.

AUTUMN

Lee Bul — From 1998 to Now
12 November 2026 – 14 February 2027

A major survey of one of the most influential artists to emerge from Asia in recent decades. Premiered in 2025 at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, the exhibition travels via Hong Kong before arriving in Antwerp. With a consistent curatorial core but site-responsive scenography, the show traces Lee Bul’s critical engagement with modernity, technology, gender and utopia – from the seminal Cyborg and Anagram series to monumental installations exploring utopian aspiration and inevitable collapse.

The presentation underscores M HKA’s position as a contemporary art museum with international networks and a distinct local grounding, bringing global artistic discourse into conversation with Antwerp’s cultural landscape.

COLLECTION PRESENTATIONS (FREE ACCESS)

Throughout 2026, M HKA will stage multiple collection presentations that resist fixed canonisation, instead treating the collection as an evolving field of inquiry. Access is free.

Carla Arocha & Stéphane Schraenen — 20 Years and More: Works from the Collection
24 January – 24 May 2026

A focused presentation of the artist duo’s work in M HKA’s collection, culminating in a new 2026 installation, Landscape (Antwerp), translating the chromatic structure of the city into immersive colour fields and reflective architectural elements.