What's the relation between a collection and a museum?
29 October 2025. CIMAM is running a global advocacy campaign in support of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), addressing the critical political decisions that threaten to remove its collection and downgrade the institution to a Kunsthalle.
We initiated this effort to gather strong arguments and demonstrate solidarity with M HKA and other museums that may face similar forms of vulnerability in other parts of the world.
CIMAM calls on its Members to raise their voices in defense of museum collections and share their views by responding to two key questions.
- Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
- What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
Format of Contributions
Participants may submit their contributions to museumwatch@cimam.org and communication@cimam.org
* A short-written statement (100 words)
Deadline
CIMAM will collect responses from 29 October - 10 December. and publish contributions daily through its website and social media channels, highlighting key quotes and voices to maintain visibility and engagement throughout the campaign. All materials will be centralized in a dedicated Museum Watch resource page, ensuring continued access and amplifying the collective message of international solidarity.
On 9 October, CIMAM published the Museum Watch article - M HKA caught in the crosshairs: what is the museum’s future? expressing support for M HKA and outlining the circumstances that threaten the very foundations of its mission as an internationally respected contemporary art museum.
As outlined in the article, the Flemish government's interference undermines the core Definition of a Museum, as established by ICOM:
“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. ”
Stripping a museum of its collection not only compromises its institutional integrity but also puts in danger its historical, cultural, and civic connection with its community.
CIMAM has opened a dedicated resource page on its website to gather related coverage and advocacy efforts - including articles condemning the decision, such as the one published by L’Internationale, and a petition calling to reverse the decision to abolish M HKA's status as a national museum.
This case raises an urgent question that can affect museums worldwide:
What is the relation between a collection and a museum?
Voices from the CIMAM Community
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Because collections serve as a source of spiritual anchorage for citizens and local communities, they enable people to preserve their dignity and humanity in their daily lives and during times of crisis. By building collections, we can pass on the histories and cultures of our regions to future generations, fostering an understanding of where we came from, the community we have become, and the future we shall build.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
Public collections are funded by citizens' taxes and public funds; they therefore belong to the citizens, not political authorities. For political authorities to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection would constitute an abuse of power and an attack on citizens' sovereignty and would be an act contrary to democracy. There is also an extremely serious risk that this could deprive citizens and local communities of their history and culture, resulting in a loss of cultural identity and civic pride.
Shihoko Iida
Independent Curator
Head of Curatorial, Aichi Triennale 2025
Nagoya, AichiJapan
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Collections are archives of languages, memories, material culture, and people. Their objects create cultural heritage like material witnesses of passing times, containing all possible futures. They are invaluable treasures like those still lost in the Louvre heist that have been contemporary art and culture at their moment of making. They are subjects, characters, interlocutors, and companions to wonder and wander. They are even capable of soothing and transforming pain from colonial injustice as knowledge between geographies and generations.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
Across all political systems, collections signal an understanding of a world that takes reality more seriously than the interpretations imposed upon them,’ said the curator and director Annaliese Mayer-Meintschel at Dresden National Art Collections in 1984 during the time of the repressive one-party system of state-socialism in the East of Germany. Collections are the backbones, the unconscious, the multiple realities, the futures of society… Removing them from contemporary access to everyone is like shutting down a public library.
Doreen Mende
Curator, Writer, and Public Scholar
Berlin, Germany
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
To collect is a situated practice: it depends on a place and context, like botanical species. Their DNA changes from place to place, like the one of the people who support them. Collections are all different because they respond to different questions and their histories are interwined with ways of building them, absolutely idiosyncratic. In the most superficial or practical way, they are thought for the conditions a museum building can offer. In the deepest way of thinking a collection, reflects the historical conditions of production and the narratives structuring the culture of a given place. To think otherwise is to neglect the productivity of a city as a cultural field, to neglect its consistency as a community.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
It is not even a risk: it is a catastrophe. To question the belonging of a collection is to question the museum as an institution that is an effect of a community. Museums are the machines that give definitions of a society. To remove a collection means to destroy that social pact that culture constitutes by itself. In a region extremely sensitive to colonial processes throughout history, it is of the foremost importance to recognise that to reallocate a collection echoes long past times of European extractivism.
Manuel Segade
Director
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Madrid, Spain
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
A collection is vital to a museum—a rhizome that connects and contributes through curatorial and educational logics to art and history, but, foremost, one that threads culture, society, and minds. To displace, reallocate, or hinder a collection is to sever these threads, destabilising the museum’s integrity and its relationship with the communities, publics and histories it represents. Such acts risk turning custodianship into control, eroding the ethical foundations of care, access, and shared cultural memory.
Shruti Ramlingaiah
Curator, Researcher
Mumbai, India
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
A museum’s collection is its soul and its memory. To deaccession is to amputate part of its identity under the illusion of progress. History shows that every purge born of a shift in curatorial perspective, art-historical valuation, or political delusion of the day ends in regret and costly repair. The same blindness now drives the Flemish government’s idea of merging the collections of M HKA and SMAK: it would dissolve distinct voices into a single, tasteless stew. A museum that forgets its own past has already deaccessioned itself.
Frank Lubbers
Emeritus Curator and Museum Director
Ghent, Belgium
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
M HKA, Memory, and the Global Provenance Debate
A museum lives through its collection, not its walls. Its works carry memory, meaning, and life—whether the public sees them or not. Think of Lascaux: sealed for millennia, yet still fully alive through its paintings. In contemporary art, the artists themselves are the first and foremost moral stakeholders: their authority over their works persists regardless of whether the pieces have been purchased, gifted, or acquired by a museum. M HKA’s holdings are rooted in Antwerp and its artist community—most strikingly embodied in Gordon Matta‑Clark’s Office Baroque (1977), which literally cut through all five floors of a building. This radical intervention, grounded in the city yet resonating universally, laid the symbolic and practical foundation for the museum: an institution inseparable from both its local civic context and the experimental energy of the artists it champions. The decision by Flemish Minister of Culture Caroline Gennez to relocate the collection to Ghent signals a radical re‑organisation of the museum landscape in Flanders, one that threatens to sever the M HKA collection from its civic, historical, and cultural context—impoverishing the life of both the art and the communities from which it emerged. As the debate over African heritage shows, a museum can only truly live when collections and place are protected together.
Barbara Vanderlinden
Curator and Art Historian
Helsinki, Finlandia
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
From an Angolan perspective, a museum’s collection is not merely a set of objects - it is the living memory of a people, a mirror of our resilience, creativity, and multiplicity. In a country still reconstructing its cultural institutions after years of conflict from a war of liberation followed by two civil wars, collections ground museums in continuity and belonging. They give shape to stories that might otherwise disappear, anchoring each museum to its community and territory. To remove a collection is to sever that vital connection between art, people, and place - to erase the very dialogue through which culture heals and renews itself.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
When political authorities interfere with collections, the ethical and governance risks are profound. From Angola’s own experience during the colonial period, we know how fragile cultural heritage becomes when power eclipses stewardship. The reallocation or removal of a museum’s collection compromises institutional independence, weakens public trust, and risks turning memory into propaganda. It transforms the museum from a civic space of reflection into an instrument of control. True cultural governance must safeguard collections as collective property - beyond political cycles - ensuring that they remain free, accessible, and accountable to the communities they represent.
Dominick A Maia Tanner
Curator
Luanda, Angola
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Museums are context-based and transgenerational projects. The collection is the platform which facilitates conversations among those who preceded us and those who will arrive in the future: whoever they are and no matter what language they´ll speak. It´s the primary source of activity in the museum. Collections help to inscribe communities and individuals into History, but also into histories and stories, in a critical way. Without a collection, there is no museum. When a collection is removed or relocated a community loses this form of shared memory, which unfolds and exists in the space through art objects.
Pedro de Llano Neira
University of Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the collective voices and soul of the people—their history and the cultures they represent—permanently held in trust by a museum. Through the museum’s stewardship of its collections, sustained dialogues between communities, both local and international, are made possible via exhibitions, loan exchanges, audience engagement programs (onsite and online), publications, and more.
When these collections are removed from a museum, it poses a high risk of diminishing the representation of these voices in public institutions, missing the opportunity for museums and collections to serve as constant and safe spaces for convergence that is accessible to all, and limiting opportunities to connect and reconnect different generations with their history and culture.
Aprille P. Tijam
Associate Director and Head of Exhibitions and Collections
Ayala Museum
Makati City, Philippines
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the driving force behind the identity of museums and their communities. Individually and collectively, the works that comprise them respond to a mission defined by those who constitute the museum. The collection amplifies the message that each institution conveys in the community that welcomes them and establishes an emotional bond of cultural belonging and irreplaceable collective memory that is built up over time, generation after generation.
The workers of the MSSA, an art museum that survived Chile's civil-military coup and 20 long years of exile, stand in solidarity with the M HKA team and call on those responsible not to intervene authoritatively and to protect the communion and indivisibility of its collection.
María José Lemaitre
Director
Caroll Yasky
Curator and Head of Collection
Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende
Santiago, Chile
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Through the collection, the museum is intrinsically linked to the history of its region and the public. Like the museum itself, the collection is always rooted in a specific time and place, reflecting the history, values, and interests of that specific region. Not only is the professional knowledge of the institution linked to the collections, but the collections can also be seen as reflecting the memory of the local community, to be fostered and re-interpreted by new generations of the public.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
When political authorities remove or reallocate a museum’s collection, they sever a vital link to the cultural heritage of a region. Museums are understood to serve their communities, and collections are central to that mission. In a new context, critical questions arise: To whom does the collection speak in a new context? How is its value redefined? Such actions risk undermining the museum’s integrity, eroding public trust, and disrupting the ethical stewardship of cultural memory.
Saara Hacklin
Chief Curator, Collections (PhD)
KIASMA
Museum of Contemporary Art
Finnish National Gallery
Helsinki, Finland
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the museum’s evidence base and social contract with the public. They anchor scholarship in place, sustain intergenerational memory, and permit communities to test narratives against objects and time. Removing or reallocating a collection breaches fiduciary stewardship, weakens arm’s-length governance, and harms cultural rights. It stifles curatorial independence, distorts research priorities, and narrows access. Such interference contradicts ICOM-aligned principles of permanence, care, interpretation, and public service. Antwerp is a warning, not an exception. M HKA’s collection must remain in public trust: intact, catalogued, accessible, and lawfully governed for today’s citizens and those not yet born.
John Kenneth Paranada
Curator of Art and Climate Change
Sainsbury Centre
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
A museum is an echo chamber that holds the uneven, fragile, and often uncomfortable narratives that communities fight to keep visible.
Protecting collections is therefore an ethical obligation: it advocates for continuity, accountability, and the public's right to remember, question, and imagine otherwise.
Amanda Ariawan
Curator | Art Writer
Indonesia,
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Museum collections are the core of an institution’s identity and integrity. They preserve cultural memory, enable critical reflection, and create long-term commitments between a museum and its public. Tselinny center of contemporary culture, Almaty and M HKA, Antwerp is in long-term partnership for the joint Şağylys collection, which demonstrates why collections matter deeply, especially presenting Central Asian artistic scene. It ensure that the region’s artistic voices are documented, researched, and presented within an international institutional framework. Such collections anchor museums in their communities by safeguarding histories that might otherwise remain fragmented or invisible. They provide continuity, foster trust, and form an essential foundation for cultural dialogue across borders.
Älima Qairat
Artistic director
Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture
Almaty, Kazakhstan
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the backbone of a museum; they can be understood as the skeleton around which the limbs, organs, veins, skin and hair are arranged. Without a collection, a museum is a plucked art gallery... Oh dear! When collections can simply be sold off or incorporated into other institutions as a result of political decisions, a community not only loses its visual archive, the history of the institution as told through objects – no, trust in the institution itself also dwindles: museums often benefit from donations or very favourable acquisitions prices because it can be assumed that an entry into a collection is FOREVER. When a collection is removed, not only is the identity of the institution at risk, but also this financial advantage on the market.
Fanni Fetzer
Direktorin
Kunstmuseum Luzern
Luzern, Switzerland
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
For me, collections form the core of a museum’s identity because they reflect the long-term commitments, responsibilities, and relationships that define our work. As a curator, I see how collections generate dialogue, foster critical thinking, and build trust over time. When we protect and thoughtfully (re)interpret them, we reinforce the museum’s integrity and its public mission. Defending collections means defending the cultural and civic role museums play in society.
Dr. Raphael Gygax
Art Historian / Curator
Locarno, Switzerland
Please help us protect collections and the integrity of museums around the world by identifying other cases here:
https://cimam.org/museum-watch/contribute-musuem-watch/