Protocols for opening the museum

Free without registration

© Sharon Hayes, In The Near Future, 2009.

Designed as “an extension of the city”, half of Kanal’s building will remain freely accessible as public space, bringing the outside indoors and creating new possibilities for encounters with art and one another. But what does it mean for a new museum in Brussels to be truly open, welcoming and accessible? People often encounter visible and invisible barriers when entering cultural institutions. Can 20 000 m2 of public space offer an alternative? Who feels welcome here, and who does not?

Type: Exhibition Live Film
Dates: 2026-2029

To investigate these questions during the museum's formative years, Kanal invites artists to imagine Protocols for opening the museum: projects developed for Kanal that test how people might collectively use, inhabit and simply be in a building that is both a museum and a public space.

From 2026 to 2029, each year explores a different question: How does a museum open? What makes it welcoming? How does it become public? These "protocols" are not fixed rules but inquiries that experiment with the civic and artistic possibilities of Kanal. They scrutinise the forms of control that restrict the use of public space. In practice, they include things like a confetti explosion, a chorus of megaphones and a choreography responding to the policing of the body.

Through these shared experiments, artists and audiences are invited to expand what public space can be, creating conditions for new ways of relating, moving, behaving, using and feeling to emerge in the museum. At a time when access to public space across Europe is increasingly restricted by private interests and state regulation, Protocols for opening the museum proposes the museum not as a finished model of publicness but as a place where publicness itself can be collectively rehearsed, contested and reinvented.

How to open (2026–27)

Coinciding with Kanal's inaugural year, the first inquiry in Protocols for opening the museum begins with a simple question: how does a cultural institution open? A group of artists have responded to this prompt with a confetti explosion, a filtered drinking fountain and a site-specific painting extending across 145 steel columns throughout the building. Other works include a film, a digital survey and a series of collective inhalations and exhalations that offer an alternative to the Belgian national anthem. Elsewhere, the question is embodied by a choir of megaphones or a set of instructions for visitors to navigate the building for the first time.

The artists taking part in this first inquiry are Apparatus 22, Ei Arakawa-Nash, Hans Haacke, Sharon Hayes, Valentina Magaletti, Sarah Smolders, Ingel Vaikla, David Weber-Krebs and Alexander Schellow. More information about each project can be found on the individual project pages below.

Protocols for opening the museum

Programme

Ei Arakawa-Nash

Hans Haacke

Sarah Smolders

Protocols for opening the museum

Valentina Magaletti

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