With Kanal-Centre Pompidou set to open on 28 November this year, the new and much-anticipated contemporary art museum announced its opening programme this week after a turbulent few years of delays.
With a surface area of 40,000 m2, Kanal is poised to become one of the largest museums in Europe.
"The museum strikes a balance between permanence and experimentation, inherited histories and imagined futures," explains Kasia Redzisz, artistic director of Kanal-Centre Pompidou.
On top of its exhibition spaces, it will be equipped with a rooftop, library, reading room, studios, play areas, restaurant, brasserie and even a bakery.
The conversion of the former Citroën factory, located on the Brussels canal, was the result of a partnership between the Brussels-Capital Region, Kanal Museum and Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2017.
'No way back'
The much-anticipated museum was due to be completed three years ago.
However, the project was hit by a series of financial and political problems, including the government formation paralysis in the Belgian capital which has threatened its launch over budgetary problems.
"This time, there is no way back", assures the managing director of the Kanal Foundation, Yves Goldstein, during the museum's announcement on Wednesday.
"This project will be done, This place can only be the museum that we have built for nine years now," he says again, brushing aside doubts concerning the lack of funding of around €50 million .
For its construction, the final bill should reach some €230 million. Of this, the Brussels Region has already committed €185 million, of which 95% has been paid. Added to this is an operating budget of around €30 million per year.
The Kanal Museum site pictured during the tour and press conference to present the opening program for the future Kanal-Centre Pompidou museum, in Brussels, on Wednesday 28 January 2026. Credit: Belga
CIVA relocates to Kanal
Now, the museum is pushing on with its plans for the big opening on 28 November 2026. This week, it announced its first exhibitions for its big opening.
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.
A Truly Immense Journey will highlight 350 works that guide you through the forces that have set people, ideas and artistic forms in motion from the early 20th century to today. It will host works from modern icons such as Lygia Clark, Sonia Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Natalia Goncharova, Wifredo Lam and Henri Matisse.
The Kanal Centre Pompidou building is currently being reconstructed, with the expected opening in 2025. Credit: Belga / Nicolas Maeterlinck
Worth highlighting is the relocation of the Brussels architecture museum CIVA, which will move from its premises in Ixelles to become Kanal Architecture, with hopes of it bringing its vast collections to a larger audience.
In addition to three exhibition halls, this new architectural space will also have 2,000 square meters of archive rooms, a research centre, a library, a study room and a bookstore, according to Bruzz.
The ex-CIVA's first special exhibition will be a tribute to Brussels with The right to the city - right to the future. Here, it positions the capital as a pioneering laboratory for new spatial practices in protest at how Brussels is "blamed for everything".
No Show by Deborah Bowmann and Maoupa Mazzocchetti is an immersive exhibition with art, light, sound and live performance uniting for an ironic take on whether "museums can entertain".
Whispering Pleas of the Eternal Echoes by Joshua Serafin is an immersive film installation that weaves together scenes across countries and generations in the search for the artists’ roots, from Manila to Hong Kong and now Brussels.
Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s La première fois [the first time] will take visitors on a light show and sound symphony that explores the museum’s underground basements, with the artists depicting her first impressions of the museum and its construction journey.
Kanal-Centre Pompidou graphic. Credit: © Central / Sophie Dars / Pierre Leguillon / Daidalos Peutz.
An infinite woman. Black Archives in Two Acts will revisit the use of Mangbetu women's image as a colonial symbol as well as its re-appropriation by artists of African descent.
Manon de Boer's installation Blindsight will offer visitors and art lovers a moment of respite amid the hustle and bustle, while in the Department of Traps, curator Clémentine Deliss invites visitors to study a series of objects and paintings that are misleading and open to multiple interpretations.
Otobong Nkanga will transform one of the museum's vast open spaces into an intimate place for meeting and co-creation around looms.
And finally, in Right?, Banu Cennetoğlu will present the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Kanal showroom in the form of bouquets of golden balloon letters that gradually deflate.
Can the museum open?
This week, the Brussels Region reached 600 days without a government, since the June 2024 elections, leaving firm questions over the project's viability due to ongoing budget problems and federal cuts.
"The programme presented today is the result of four years of work. You can't improvise a museum in 10 months. The political world understands this," said Kanal Foundation's Goldstein on Wednesday.
"Either you do things badly, or you see the process through to the end, which is something that most of the Brussels political world understands and recognises."
Goldstein added that as thing now, they can continue until the end of their management contract. In 2027-2028, Kanal Foundation will sit down with either the caretaker government or the fully-fledged government to negotiate the 2029-2033 management contract.
"Today, what I am asking politicians is to respect the contracts we have signed so that we can see through the opening and the first two years of programming," he added.
