After Many Delays, Kanal-Centre Pompidou in Brussels Will Open in November

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. The Kanal-Centre Pompidou, acollaboration between the Centre Pompidou and the Brussels-based institution Kanal, will finally open on November 28 after a decade of planning, renovations, and delays. Designed around an Art Deco building that formerly housed a Citroën garage, the new 430,000-square-foot complex at Place de l’Yser on the banks of the Charleroi-Brussels Canal is Brussels’ only major modern and contemporary art museum. More than 215,000 square feet of the complex will be devoted to freely accessible spaces that include 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. About 130,000 square feet are dedicated to exhibition spaces. Of that area, the Pompidou has roughly 21,500 square feet for shows that draw on its collection and for temporary exhibitions held twice a year. Kanal was established and has been funded by the Brussels-Capital Region—which includes nineteen municipalities, including the city of Brussels—since 2017. It has some 100 objects in its own collection and has budgeted about €250,000 ($290,350) each year to grow that number. The renewable partnership between the Pompidou and Kanal runs until 2031. The largest of Kanal-Centre Pompidou’s inaugural exhibitions is “A truly immense journey,” which features 350 works from the 1900s to the present by artists such as Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Lygia Clark, Sonia Delaunay, and Wilfredo Lam on the theme of movement and migration. The works come largely from the Pompidou, with contributions from Kanal and private and public Belgian collections. Kanal’s first exhibitions focus on artists who remain “rooted in a local context,” according to Kanal-Centre Pompidou artistic director Kasia Redzisz. This includes several shows that highlight Belgium-based artists such Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Christoph Fink, Manon de Boer, Joshua Serafin, Kasper Bosmans, and Guillaume Bijl. Another inaugural show is “An infinite Woman: Black Archives in Two Acts,” which examines the legacy of imagery related to Mangbetu women in the context of the Citroën company’s historic financing of colonial propaganda. Contemporary artists of African descent, including the Belgian-based Agneskena and Agnes Lalau, as well as international artists such as Simone Leigh, Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, and Barbara Walker, subvert and reclaim that imagery. In the early 1930s, car tycoon André Citroën established a new flagship plant, designed by architects Alexis Dumont, Marcel Van Goethem, and Maurice-Jacques Ravazé. Conceived of as a “cathedral for cars,” the modernist complex was constructed with concrete, steel, and glass and boasts a glass-walled showroom nearly seventy feet tall. Citroën vacated the building in 2014. The renovation was performed by the architectural firms noAarchitecten (Brussels), EM2N (Zurich), and Sergison Bates architects (London).