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.
Pop Art by the American artist Red Grooms and a 2019 sculpture called “Space Refugee” by Omar Imam are on view, as well as paintings by the itinerant 16th-century artist Hans Holbein the Younger and the Dutch abstract artist Willem de Kooning, who immigrated to the United States from Rotterdam. Interspersed among these are artifacts and objects d’art including a stateless person’s document and a large slab of the Berlin Wall, a barrier to movement for Germans during the Cold War.
Fenix’s architect, Ma Yansong, from the Beijing-based firm MAD, said he imagined the dual spiral staircase at the center of the building — with steel walls and a slatted wood floor like on a ship — as a metaphor for the migrant experience.
“My understanding of migration is like a journey, but it’s not linear,” he said in an interview. “There’s a process of choice, so it’s two staircases, not just one.”
Pijbes began working on the migration museum in 2018, and it is opening at a moment when immigration continues to be a burning global issue.
In the United States, President Trump has promised to mount the largest deportation operation in American history, while in the Netherlands, the government recently introduced what it described as the “strictest asylum policy in the Netherlands’ history.”
Fenix’s founders, however, say they are not interested in engaging in political debates at the museum, because they see migration as a universal fact of life.
“Fenix is not a museum about politics,” Pijbes said. “The story we tell is that migration has been an experience of mankind since the beginning.”
“Whether it was Huguenots, Jews, Albanians or Protestants,” Pijbes added, “people have always been on the move, for bad reasons — because of war or oppression — but also for love, or in search of a better future, or just out of curiosity, to try something new.”
Anne Kremers, the museum’s director, echoed that sentiment. “In Fenix, we will show, not tell,” she said. “We will ask a lot of questions to our visitors, and we want them to think — and we really want to welcome everyone — so it doesn’t matter what your political point of view is.”
One of the museum’s installations, “The Family of Migrants,” features hundreds of photographs of migrants organized into three sections: departures, journeys and arrivals. Among them are Alfred Stieglitz’s 1907 image of passengers on a ship from the United States to Europe, and John Moore’s 2018 color photo of a toddler from Honduras who cried beside her mother as they were detained by border guards in Texas.
The installation, and accompanying book with more photographs, was inspired by Edward Steichen’s famous 1955 photo book, “The Family of Man,” Kremers said, which also sought to universalize human experiences across the globe through photography.
Pijbes, a former director of the Rijksmuseum, said he conceived of Fenix in 2017 as a Dutch sister site to the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration in New York when he was hired by the Rotterdam-based art foundation Droom en Daad (Dream and Do) to develop a cultural center for the city. Since then, the foundation has purchased more than 300 artworks for the museum’s permanent collection.
About 150 are on display, Kremers said, adding that those would be rotated with others from the collection. “We’re still buying,” Pijbes said, although he and Kremers both declined to comment on Fenix’s total cost.
The artworks are all of museum caliber and include pieces by the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra and the Thai artist Jakkai Siributr.
Red Grooms’ 1995 soft sculpture, “The Bus,” a fabric replica of a New York M5 bus, which travels the length of Manhattan from West 31st Street to Washington Heights, takes pride of place in the central exhibition hall.
Pijbes said the work was symbolic of the positive results of successful migration. “This bus is full of New Yorkers and when you enter, you can see the melting pot, the Big Apple, this whole mélange of people that makes New York New York.”
For him, migration is not a problem to be solved, but a fascinating topic that has inspired many artists.
“This museum is also about hope,” Pijbes said, “because all refugees and migrants have one thing in common, and that’s the hope for a better future.”
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