10 amazing new museums around the world we’re excited to visit in 2023

A work in progress for more than a decade, Egypt’s long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum is finally set to open for visitors in late 2023. The GEM is expected to be the world’s largest archeological museum and will display more than 100,000 artifacts. Amongst the collection, you’ll find 5,000 treasures unearthed from the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, which will be on public display for the first time in history. Exciting times indeed.

Once a highly-lauded, three-Michelin-star restaurant overlooking a Costa Brava beach, Spain’s elBulli is reopening to the public for the first time since it closed up shop in 2011 – but with a twist. elBulli1846 will be a first-of-its-kind restaurant museum, showcasing the legacy of elBulli and the inventive cuisine crafted by its former head chef Ferran Adrià. Opened in 1964, the restaurant was named the world’s best not once, not twice, but five times. Note: there won’t be actual food (sorry).

After almost two decades of planning and building, this summer will see the grand opening of the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The space, which sits on pillars above the site of a trading port where almost half of enslaved Africans entered the country, will chronicle the African American journey. Across the nine exhibition spaces, there will be 700 works of art and artifacts.

In February this year, a new museum dedicated to Indian art and design opened to the public in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru. The Museum of Art & Photography (MAP, for short) houses over 60,000 works by predominantly South Asian artists. From photographs and basalt sculptures to video and performance art, the extensive collection spans over 1,000 years. A must-visit.

Whether you love or loathe AI, there’s no denying its prevalence in our culture in 2023 – and this new museum in Seoul, opening in July, is a testament to its flourishing appeal. Loaded with all things artificial intelligence and robotics, the RAIM aims to educate the public on machine learning and robotic technologies. Scarily dystopian or super interesting? Well, that’s up to you to decide.

A mix-and-match of music, dance, art, and performance, Manchester’s Factory International is a brand-new cultural hub showcasing creativity and innovation in one of the UK’s buzziest cities. The blockbuster arts venue, which this year will be home to the largest-ever Yayoi Kusama immersive exhibition, came first on Time Out’s annual list of the best things to do in the UK – so you know it's gonna be good.

Already an iconic location in Paris, the home of French music legend Serge Gainsbourg is finally, finally opening to the public this September. La Maison Gainsbourg will be a museum-slash-bookshop-slash-café-slash-piano bar, all in tribute to the late singer. You can snoop around the place where Serge spent the last 20 years of his life – there’s even a leftover ashtray of cigarette butts and half-finished bottles of red.

Freshly redesigned and opening again to the public this summer is the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, an institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art in upstate New York. New features include a two-storey building for larger pieces of art, an enclosed Sculpture Terrace, and a courtyard covered with a glass canopy and mirrors – a large-scale installation named Common Sky, created by Olafur Eliasson.

Founded by Holocaust survivors in the mid-1980s, Toronto’s Holocaust Museum will re-open this summer after receiving a huge cash injection from the Azrieli Foundation. The brand-new, state-of-the-art museum will be dedicated to excellence and innovation in Holocaust education, with a focus on the survivor experience in post-war Canada. 

Three years after being severely damaged in the Beirut Port explosion, the Sursock Museum – a shrine to contemporary art in the heart of Beirut – reopened in the spring. The building's restorations are extensive: as well as stained glass windows, doors, elevators and ceilings, 50 artworks have been revived.