An exhibition in a time of ruptures
We live in a time in which it is not self-evident to remain hopeful. Social values are under pressure, expertise is questioned, and simplification often takes precedence over nuance.
That is precisely why this is a moment when museums must also look at themselves. What is a museum today? And why does it matter?
More than a building
Museums are more than buildings. They are places where a society preserves its memory, explores its imagination and helps shape its future.
But that memory is not stable. It is formed in a world that itself is constantly shifting.
Since the end of the Cold War, that world has not developed linearly, but through a succession of rupture points: from the optimism after 1989, through the shock of 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008, to the return of geopolitical conflicts, the rise of populism and the recent wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran. What once seemed an era of openness has gradually turned into a situation of uncertainty, confrontation and repositioning.
It is within this historical dynamic that M HKA developed the collection presentation The situation is fluid.
The exhibition brings together around thirty key works from the collection — from the 1960s to today — and places them in dialogue with international voices from the collection of the Flemish Community. These are artists who live and work in Flanders, or are meaningfully connected to it.
Together, these works offer a concentrated view of a period in which the role of artists, the relationship between culture and society, and the boundaries of art are constantly questioned and redefined.
Five perspectives provide a guiding thread — the political, the body, the institutional, image-thinking and engagement — not as strictly demarcated chapters, but as overlapping ways of looking at the same reality.
A state in motion
At the outset, the visitor is confronted with Tremor, Rumour, Hoover (2001) by Hüseyin Alptekin. Three words form a chain: an event becomes a rumour, a rumour becomes a collective reality.
The work emerged in the aftermath of an earthquake, but today it can be read as an image of how information, fear and meaning spread globally — accelerated, distorted and often uncontrollable.
This logic of shifting returns in the title of the exhibition, borrowed from Ayman Ramadan: The Situation Is Fluid. A diplomatic formulation that simultaneously suggests and evades meaning — thereby exposing the ambiguity of our time.
What both works make visible is a transition: from a world that believed it understood itself, to a world in which certainties erode and meanings constantly shift.
Looking in a time of fault lines
These five perspectives — the political, the body, the institutional, image-thinking and engagement — reveal how these fault lines manifest across different registers.
In the political, it becomes clear how images and ideology are intertwined. Works by Oksana Shachko and Cady Noland show how power inscribes itself in representation — and how that representation can be undermined.
The body appears as a site where these tensions become tangible. In Rest Energy by Marina Abramović and Ulay, vulnerability is literally placed under tension, while Lili Dujourie and Nicola L. rethink the relationship between looking, participating and embodied experience.
The line of institutional critique makes visible that the museum itself is not a neutral space. With Office Baroque, Gordon Matta-Clark marks a historical turning point that also underpins the M HKA collection. Artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Taus Makhacheva question who speaks, and who produces meaning.
Among image-thinkers, the image itself becomes problematic. In the work of Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, painting appears as a form of thinking that does not resolve doubt and ambiguity, but makes them visible.
In the section on engagement, the relationship with the world becomes explicit. Artists such as Otobong Nkanga, Barbara Kruger and Andrea Fraser show how art relates to globalisation, media and power — and how this relationship is becoming increasingly conflictual.
The collection as compass
What connects these works is not a single narrative, but a shared condition: they emerge in a world in which the grand narratives of progress and stability are under pressure.
The M HKA collection — built up since the 1980s and rooted in the post-war avant-garde in Antwerp — functions as a compass, not as an archive of certainties.
It reveals how artists respond to shifting political, economic and cultural realities — from the optimistic expansion of the late twentieth century to the more fragmented and conflictual world of today.
What remains
De toestand is vloeibaar does not present a stable world, but a world in transition. From a moment of liberal euphoria to a time of crisis, confrontation and systemic struggle.
Yet within that fluidity also lies a task.
A museum derives its meaning not from the certainty of the moment, but from what it chooses to preserve, to examine and to pass on.
The exhibition invites visitors not only to observe this movement, but also to understand it — as part of a history that is still very much being written.
For what is fluid today will shape what takes form tomorrow.
