Brussels’ first museum of modern and contemporary art, Kanal-Centre Pompidou, has announced its inaugural season programme. The €230m redevelopment project, referred to as Europe’s largest museum development, is housed in the transformed 40,000 sqm former Citroën factory and is due to open to the public in Brussels on 28th November 2026.
Kanal will feature 5 floors of art gallery spaces, dedicated spaces for architectural programmes, performance, a film screening auditorium, workshops, community spaces, cafes, a rooftop restaurant/bar, an in-house bakery, and open spaces free to everyone all day. The transformation of the Citroën factory to create Kanal has been carried out by international architect groups, including EM2N (Zurich), noAarchitecten (Brussels) and Sergison Bates architects (London), working together under one name: Atelier Kanal.
Kanal’s artistic director Kasia Redzisz emphasised that creativity was not missing in the city, but that there was an “institutional absence” and that “Kanal is founded in response to this condition — not as a corrective, but as a proposition.”
Part of the opening programme is A truly immense journey, a major exhibition featuring more than 350 works drawn from the collection of the Centre Pompidou, as well as the Kanal collection, Belgian and international public and private collections. This will include works by renowned modern artists: Lygia Clark, Sonia Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Natalia Goncharova, Wifredo Lam and Henri Matisse, alongside contemporary international and Brussels-based artists including Sammy Baloji, Edith Dekyndt, Aglaia Konrad and Hana Mileti?.
coloured, mute. 52 seconds. Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris. © droits réservés
Alongside the collection exhibition, the inaugural programme includes a series of solo and group exhibitions. This includes the CIVA collection’s exhibition, the city’s renowned archive of architecture, Right to the city — Right to the future, which documents the story of the modernisation of Brussels. The city was regarded as a pioneer of urban change in the 1960s, affected not just by professional architects and planners but also by activists and citizens, and involved large-scale demolition, most notably the predominantly working-class North quarter, the neighbourhood of Kanal, under the so-called Manhattan Plan.
Among the commissions by Kanal for the opening is a 700 sqm playground on the first floor where everyone aged four and up can explore and experiment freely. Created by Turner Prize-winning British-based collective Assemble, it takes the form of an imaginary landscape of hills, volcanoes and distant planets.
Kanal © Bart Grietens
Another notable opening exhibition, as it directly references the Citroën factory, is An infinite woman. In 1925, a Mangbetu woman from north-eastern Congo became the campaign image of a colonial propaganda expedition, sponsored by Citroën. Now converted into a museum, Kanal reopens with this exhibition to revisit how the Mangbetu women functioned as a colonial symbol and how artists of African descent have reclaimed and subverted this imagery until the present day.
At a press conference in Brussels, Kanal’s managing director Yves Goldstein emphasised the creation of the museum as reflecting the deeply international city. With Brussels’ international population now at almost 40%, he sees the museum and art as a
“Powerful catalyst for living together in Brussels”
and that
“Architecture is about building the city of tomorrow.”
MORE: @kanal.centrepompidou
