BRUSSELS.- The MIMA opened its doors in March 2016 along the Canal in Brussels, in a building of the former Bellevue breweries.

The MIMA is a contemporary art Museum, unique of its kind in Europe, that will enable the public to explore a history of culture 2.0.

The Internet, low-cost air travel and the mobile telephone have taken culture away from its territorial locus and made it mobile. As Jeremy Rifkin aptly put it: “One’s sense of being is less anchored to a place than to a state of mind. Cultures are becoming transnational and global, just like commercial and political activity.”

A new kind of cosmopolitanism emerges against this backdrop of galloping globalisation called culture 2.0 here, the multiple identities and affiliations extend to the entire planet.

This culture that is emerging with the Internet at the onset of the new millennium is going viral. Artists nowadays communicate directly with the public. They no longer need intermediaries. The MIMA tells their story.

Fifteen years ago, only a handful of intellectuals could gauge the scope of upheavals brought about by the new means of communication. In its development, the web has redefined our cultures, making increasingly more room for works that reflect their values, turning subcultures into mainstream. For this reason, urban art and its avatars have emerged as the major artistic phenomenon of the millennium.

Martin Irvine provides this summary: “Street art (…) is a paradigm of hybridity in global visual culture, a post-postmodern genre being defined more by real-time practice than by any sense of unified theory, movement, or message.”

The MIMA is a museum of visual arts for the general public, determined to make a contribution to this empathetic, iconoclastic, collaborative, participatory and transversal cultural impetus that lurks inside each and every one of us and is only asking to come out.

The works of art it shows are deliberately free of partitions combining different worlds freely: music cultures (punk-rock, electro, hip hop, folk...), graphics (graphic art, illustration, design), sports (skateboarding, surfing, extreme sports), the arts (cinema, plastic art, performance, comic strip, tattoo, fashion design) and urban art (graffiti, street art).

Stemming essentially from “sub-cultures,” such as street art, skateboarding, and graphic art, the artists shown attain remarkable recognition, independently from the network of galleries and art centres.

At times designated as urban art, millennial artistic expression readily expands creative experiments outside galleries. A case in point is Parra, the Dutch artist who created the MIMA logo, who also happens to be a skateboarder, plastic artist, graphic artist, video clip producer, musician (“LE LE”), where every one of his projects bears his artistic signature and attracts a new following for him.