Kanal opens 28.11.26

In ten months, Kanal will open with ten exhibitions that span art and architecture, ranging from collection displays to group exhibitions and site-specific installations.

Press 28.01.2026

The Kanal showroom at night on the Sainctelette Square — © Koen Van Damme

At the end of January, Kanal-Centre Pompidou and Kanal Architecture presented the ten exhibitions that will inaugurate the new museum on 28 November. Together, they make up a diverse programme that reflects Belgium's vibrant art scene while bringing numerous masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou collection to Brussels for the very first time.

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The opening of Kanal also marks a new chapter in the cultural history of Brussels and beyond. The new institution, conceived from the outset as a museum, emerges in a city characterised at once by an intense artistic activity and an institutional absence. Brussels is a place where contemporary art has long flourished without a museum of modern and contemporary art to call its own. Kanal is founded in response to this situation – not as a corrective, but as a proposition.

The inaugural programme establishes Kanal as a place where exhibitions, collections, live practices and participatory processes are inextricably linked. Its vision is based on four key elements: its role as a museum; its societal mission; its collection and support of new artistic production; and the partnership with the Centre Pompidou.

This partnership gives Kanal sustained access to one of the world’s most significant collections of modern and contemporary art. Due to differences in context, perspective and institutional history, the collaboration is conceived as a dialogue rather than as a transfer of authority. The first highlight of this joint endeavour is A truly immense journey, an exhibition that covers more than 2000 m2 and three floors. In the next five years, Kanal will stage other exhibitions that also draw from the Paris collection: two photography exhibitions (Robert Frank and Brassaï) and four exhibitions focusing on iconic figures of modernism (Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Braque/Picasso, Matisse).

In parallel to A truly immense journey, the opening features nine other exhibitions that will be presented in the different public and museal spaces of Kanal.

Kanal Architecture, formerly CIVA, presents the exhibition Right to the City - Right to the Future, exploring the transformation of the Brussels’ Quartier Nord as seen through the prism of the institution’s extensive historical collections.

Throughout the museum, visitors can discover exhibitions that don’t require a ticket. In one of the open public spaces, Antwerp-based artist Otobong Nkanga places an installation with looms that encourages encounters and co-creation. And Kanal’s showroom provided a fitting setting for the monumental work right?, in which Banu Cennetoğlu – for the first time – brings together all the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as bunches of gold letter balloons.

The exhibition An infinite woman, meanwhile, examines how the image of a Mangbetu woman became a viral colonial symbol and how artists of African descent have reappropriated and subverted this imagery until the present day.

Belgian artists and artists working in Brussels are also widely represented in the programme. Joëlle Tuerlinckx brings an immersive sound composition to the Lower Room, an underground exhibition space buried deep within the museum's foundations. In Room 7, Manon de Boer invites visitors to slow down in Blindsight, a sensory experience that unfolds at the intersection of music, dance and film. Multimedia artist Joshua Serafin, whose work centres on choreography and themes of queerness, creates the film installation Whispering pleas of the eternal echoes, which is accompanied by different performances. In the exhibition NO SHOW, Deborah Bowmann, Maoupa Mazzocchetti and 20 Brussels-based artists ask the cheeky question: can a museum (still) entertain? And curator Clémentine Deliss invites visitors to the Département des Pièges to take a closer look at a collection of rarely displayed objects and paintings – all traps or "pièges" – from 11 Brussels museums.

In addition to these shows, Kanal will also host a wide range of live arts with performance, dance, music, film, theatre and other events. The live programme will be announced later this year.