More than a century ago, millions of people trying to escape poverty, persecution or war in Europe boarded ships in the harbor of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for a trans-Atlantic journey to a new life.
Today, people can enter a former warehouse there, climb a winding staircase and look out from a cantilevered viewing deck onto the spot where the ships carrying those people once set sail.
This is Fenix, an art museum dedicated to the theme of migration that opens to the public on Friday. A once-derelict pier stockroom has been transformed into an expansive white-box art space and is crowned with a polished steel double-helix swirl that adds a distinctive architectural signature to Rotterdam’s skyline.
“It’s all about movement,” said Wim Pijbes, the chairman of the foundation that runs the new museum. “It’s not genealogical, it’s not art historical, it’s not documentary. It’s a mix of objects: high art, low art, personal objects, video, film, photography, ceramics. It’s all there, like a symphony.”
Unlike other migration museums in New York, London or Paris, which typically narrate specific histories of immigrants and refugees, Fenix takes a different, more wide-ranging, approach.
Visitors first encounter two small exhibitions downstairs — one showcasing photojournalistic images and the other filled with thousands of battered suitcases — that underscore the idea that migration is an integral part of a universal human experience. The main exhibition, “All Directions,” installed in a 75,000-square-foot concrete and glass hall upstairs, displays fine art that either directly or obliquely makes reference to that experience.
