Mark the diary: on Saturday 28 November 2026, Brussels finally cuts the ribbon on Kanal, a new museum of modern and contemporary art inside the vast former Citroën garage at Place de l'Yser. Better still, the whole opening weekend is free.
The project has been close to a decade in the making. A partnership between Paris's Centre Pompidou, the Brussels-Capital Region and the Kanal Foundation was agreed back in 2017, with the idea of filling a real gap: the Belgian capital has long had a lively contemporary art scene but no dedicated museum for modern and contemporary work. Kanal-Centre Pompidou, as the institution is formally known, is meant to change that.
Its scale alone makes it worth a trip. The building covers 40,000 square metres, putting it among the largest museums in Europe, and it opens with ten exhibitions. The centrepiece is 'A Truly Immense Journey', a show of 350 works, four-fifths of them on loan from the Centre Pompidou collection in Paris. There's more than art on site too: plans include a bakery, a restaurant, a rooftop bar and a museum shop.
The opening weekend runs non-stop from 10am on Saturday 28 November to 10pm on Sunday 29 November, with no tickets or reservations needed just to explore the building. Expect concerts, DJ sets, live performances, films, installations and family workshops around the clock. To see the ten exhibitions themselves you'll need to book a time slot in advance — but those slots are free too, with 24 slots across the weekend and capacity for more than 30,000 visitors.
Two caveats for planners. First, the architecture centre and the collections wing will open later than the rest of the museum, a knock-on effect of a fire in July 2026. Second, before the public opening, Kanal is hosting around 5,000 children from 27 Brussels schools — a signal that the museum is positioning itself as a civic project as much as a cultural one.
For travellers, this is a good excuse to (re)visit Brussels in late autumn. Pair a Kanal visit with the city's existing art heavyweight, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, and the canal-side Molenbeek district around Place de l'Yser, which has been quietly gentrifying for years. The museum joins the recently renovated boitsquarter and Brussels' growing roster of architectural conversions, and it gives the city something it has conspicuously lacked: a flagship venue for postwar and contemporary art at Paris-Pompidou standard.
If you can't make opening weekend, note that Kanal is expected to remain a major draw through 2027, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris is closing for renovation — meaning Brussels will be one of the easiest places to see that collection outside France.
