The popular Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art or MIMA on the Henegouwenkaai in the Brussels borough of Molenbeek is to close early next year the contemporary art museum’s management has announced.
The MIMA started in 2016 in the buildings of the former Belle-Vue brewery in Molenbeek. Since then, seventeen exhibitions have taken place, attracting more than 400,000 visitors.
The current exhibition “Multitude,” featuring street art by Portugal’s Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, will be its last. It runs till Sunday 5 January 2025. Two exhibitions planned after that - those by the Italian-Japanese duo Lolo & Sosaku and by the Brussels collective Crafteke - will be cancelled.
The announcement of the closure was unexpected, because as recently as April the MIMA was still considering expanding. “That was followed by a sharp drop in the number of visitors of more than 50 percent, which began when the Henegouwenkaai was unexpectedly closed to traffic in July,” the museum says.
The work in the vicinity of the museum will only be complete within a year and a half at the earliest. The museum decided to close because there is no guarantee visitor numbers will rebound once the works are over.
The MIMA derived 50 percent of its revenue from ticket sales. The rest of its funding came from an annual crowdfunding (15 percent) and from grants and private donations (35 percent).