For quite some years now Bart De Baere is director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA) that just started up the process for getting a new building aiming to make its present international reputation sustainable in the future.
M HKA over the past years made ambitious group exhibitions and monographic exhibitions that were often key to the international positioning of artists, such as with Jimmie Durham, Harald Theys and Jos De Gruyter, Kerry James Marshall, Otobong Nkanga, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven or now Laure Prouvost. Last fall it made a survey of James Lee Byars, this fall it will make one of Marcel Broodthaers. M HKA is also organising many smaller presentations, it has a film museum that now moves to De Studio and has a centre for visual art archives. Before that, Bart worked in the M HK Gent (now SMAK) curating many exhibitions there.
He was a curator of Documenta IX in 1992 and became friends then with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, David Hammons or Ilya Kabakov. He is considered a seminal curator and did a lot of stuff all over the world and in Flanders, where even was advisor to the minister of culture writing legislation for three years.