Thirty thousand tickets sold out in a single day. On November 28, the former Citroën garage in Brussels' North district opened as a museum, the largest in Europe for modern and contemporary art.

The institution itself announced that all 30,000 free tickets granting access to the opening weekend exhibitions were snapped up in just one day. For the remaining tickets, Kanal remained open for thirty-six consecutive hours, from 10:00 AM on Saturday, November 28, to 10:00 PM on Sunday, November 29, with a completely free program of performances, concerts, DJ sets, films, and workshops. The very first visitors were 5,000 students from the twenty-seven schools in the district, who were welcomed on November 25.

Glass, steel, concrete, nighttime lighting designed as a spectacle: from 1933 to 1934, a showcase for the automobile was built here. Purchased in 2015 by the Brussels Region, the building became, after a call for projects won by the architects EM2N, noAarchitecten and Sergison Bates, a museum costing 230 million euros and covering 40,000 square meters, one and a half times the size of the Guggenheim Bilbao. Five floors, 12,000 square meters of exhibition space, a library, a research center, a bookstore, workshops, a bakery, a rooftop bar, and over 21,500 square meters of freely accessible public spaces, including a 700-square-meter playground designed by the Turner Prize-winning collective Assemble.

“Creativity has never been lacking,” says Kasia Redzisz, artistic director. “What was missing was an institution capable of containing it.” »

Ten exhibitions and 250 artists kick things off, thanks to an agreement established with the Centre Pompidou since 2017. The central space, longer but narrower than the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, hosts the manifesto-exhibition A Truly Immense Journey: more than 350 works, primarily from the collections of the Centre Pompidou and Kanal, on the theme of displacement, from Matisse to Wolfgang Tillmans, by way of Giacometti, Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, and Lygia Clark.

Alongside it, An Infinite Woman follows the fate of an image: that of a Mangbetu woman from northeastern Congo, who in 1925 became the emblem of the Black Cruise, a colonial expedition financed by… Citroën. Artists of African descent, from Simone Leigh to Faith Ringgold, reclaim it. NO SHOW brings together twenty Brussels artists to explore the museum as spectacle, in the very place where the city's first amusement park was located. In addition, there are solo exhibitions by Banu Cennetoğlu, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Otobong Nkanga, and a Department of Traps, nets, traps, lures, and illusions on loan from eleven Brussels museums.

Find our other European favorites in our top new releases of the week.

Brussels isn't the only city expanding its walls this autumn: the Beyeler Foundation is inaugurating its Peter Zumthor-designed buildings, and our exhibitions in Belgium are closely following the season.

KANAL-CENTRE POMPIDOU
Opening on November 28, 2026
Place Sainctelette 11-12, 1000 Brussels
Metro: Yser / IJzer (lines 2 and 6)
Free opening weekend, from Sat. Nov. 28, 10 a.m. to Sun. Nov. 29, 10 p.m.
Opening hours and prices at kanal.brussels