“So long as we exist, we migrate, we move,” Anne Kremers, director of Fenix, tells Observer. The recently inaugurated museum in Rotterdam (itself a city host to 170 nationalities) is focused on migration, though as sociopolitical precarity escalates and prohibitive immigration policies are reactively instated across the globe, the institution will not reflect such changes. “It’s not a political museum in that sense,” Kremers says of reacting to the news cycle. “Migration is really stories about people. It’s not about facts and numbers.”
The city’s port district—Katendrecht—is a fitting place to host a museum dedicated to the movement of people. The restored reinforced-concrete warehouse in which the museum is housed today was once a headquarters for steamshipping between the Netherlands and the Americas. Rotterdam’s harbor served as a nexus for the journeys of millions of emigrants in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Today, Fenix is a vast and luminous venue, with enormous windows connecting the visitor to the neighborhood, honoring a complex issue in a comfortable context. “The exhibition design is very toned down,” Kremers notes. “We want visitors to see the building and to see the art.”
The space’s centerpiece is “the Tornado,” a double helix rising from the ground floor to the rooftop, ceaseless reflective surfaces creating engrossing mirrored distortions. At its height, it unfurls onto a viewing platform with clear visibility over the city. There are two staircases; along the way, you can change your route. Feeling a little bit adrift in the crossover is, of course, an emblematic rite of passage here.
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Beyond the exhibitions, there is a desire to federate people who have experienced migration or dislocation in the space. Plein, a free public square, hosts events in tandem with various community organizations. (As André Aciman wrote: “the customs you feel most comfortable with are those you never knew were customs until you saw others practice completely different ones.”) There are language exchanges, a big kitchen in which to cook native cuisines and special events during World Refugee Day and Chinese New Year.
However, art is the mainstay. The ground floor contains two temporary exhibitions—a photography show, “The Family of Migrants,” and a gigantic installation, “Suitcase Labyrinth”—while the upstairs galleries show pieces from Fenix’s collection, which has been growing steadily over the past five years. “All Directions” showcases some 150 works drawn from that collection. The mise-en-scène across 6000 square meters will change slightly every few months with new acquisitions. “Migration is a never-ending story, of course,” Kremers says. “There are a lot of things we’re already covering, but there are always stories that we’re not telling. So if we’re acquiring, it should be a good addition to the artists and the artworks that we already have in the collection.”
Fenix commissioned several pieces, including an ensemble of blue-beaded hand sculptures by French artist Beya Gille Gacha—gestures being a means to communicate beyond language—and American artist Hugo Mccloud’s migration patterns on canvas made from ironed plastic bags, highlighting a material symbolic of carrying in a desperate rush and disposability.
The museum impressively samples different kinds of stories, different scales of migratory disruption and different regions affected by recent and past turmoil, only occasionally drawing from more facile depictions.
The first object installed was a segment of the Berlin Wall, which stood from 1975 to 1989, splitting communist East Germany from capitalist West Germany. It dialogues with a work by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, State of Being (Passport), 2023, in which travel documents of German lovers that she found at a flea market bear the stamps of visiting each other on either side of the wall. Here, the documents are suspended in the artist’s signature dense web of threads in literal and existential paralysis.
Many works have a connection to the Netherlands. Willem de Kooning was a Rotterdam native son; Man in Wainscott, 1969, is here on display. In his 20s, he illegally smuggled himself onboard a U.S.-bound ship from this very port: his propulsive aspiration to become a famous artist came to be, given his reputation as a pillar of Abstract Expressionism.
Another Dutch mainstay, Rineke Dijkstra, is shown here via her longstanding series Almerisa, 1994-present. It began when her namesake subject was six years old; having fled Bosnia, she was living in a refugee asylum in Leiden. At the time, Dijkstra asked various children from the asylum to wear their best clothes so she could photograph them. Almerisa was wearing too-small patent leather shoes and, from her seated perch, was so petite that her feet didn’t yet reach the ground. Dijkstra was particularly touched by her and started photographing her every couple of years. The series has the affecting continuity of watching someone age, change and grow (present in Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, if with a more harrowing origin story). A plain background and chair are the only constants in each image. Fenix owns the series and, every few years, acquires a new photo. Almerisa, who still lives in the Netherlands, attended the opening.
In a more hybrid vision of Dutch identity, Tresses, 2017-2020, by Benin-born Meschac Gaba, recreates the silhouettes of iconic buildings in Rotterdam—Centraal Station, Witte Huis—fashioned from the braids used in African hair salons. It’s a bright, ingenious way to couple disparate traditions and places with flair. (“We don’t shy away from the dark sides of migration, but still, there’s a lot of color. I think it invites the visitor to have a close look,” Kremers says.) In a similar spirit of bridging, Swiss-born Netherlands-based photographer Marwan Bassiouni’s New Dutch Views, 2018, encompasses dual horizons: carpeted interiors of mosques juxtaposed with the brick buildings and slanted rooftops visible through open windows, linking within a single frame the realities of Muslim practices against Dutch living.
Various works transform representative burdens of migration into creative potential. Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska, who left her homeland when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, repurposed visa and residence application paperwork (with letterhead from Landes-Kultur GMBH and the British Embassy in Ukraine) into backdrops onto which she drew furious faces and loaded words (“no? fucking immigrant?”). This determination to reinvent is also behind Brazilian artist Alexandre de Cunha’s Kentucky (Napoli), 2020. What from afar looks like a large-scale textile work is, up close, a customized curtain of mop heads, nodding to the thousands of immigrants who take on thankless cleaning jobs to survive.
In a more literal take on migration, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’s Geographies, 2007-2008, was inspired by military maps. Landmasses stripped of country names are instead labeled with binaries: utopia/dystopia, other/self, object/subject. The renamed maps highlight the arbitrary nature of designating different parts of the world as “other,” of our knee-jerk distrust of wherever we aren’t.
Also critical of such dividing lines is French artist JR’s Giants, Kikito and the Border Patrol, 2017. The photograph depicts a jarring in-situ work in which he blew up a black-and-white image of Kikito, a one-year-old Mexican boy. Kikito’s image looms in monumental proportions over American guards along the border with Mexico. It is a work meant to be seen from the American side of the divide, to haunt the guards. Kikito’s eyes are downcast as if gazing tenderly at the guards, his oversized hands clasping at the top of the border fence as if he will hoist himself over.
One of the most disconcerting works is Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (Gate), 2009. Twice every half hour, a swinging iron gate slams, sounding as loudly as a gunshot, startling the visitor and visibly damaging the wall. It manifests the violence of demarcating, and its erosion of the wall demonstrates that nothing is indestructible.
Interspersed throughout, offsetting the artworks, are dark and astonishing historical artifacts. These include 19th-century ankle shackles used to prevent enslaved Africans from starting uprisings as they crossed the Atlantic, and a bathroom door circa 1940 marked COLORED from the time of American racial segregation. There’s a boat that crossed to Europe from North Africa, donated by the Ufficio Dogane e Monopoli di Porto Empedocle Sezione Operativa Territoriale Lampedusa after being plucked from the ship graveyard. There is a staggeringly racist 19th-century toy pistol atop which are two figures, a white man kicking an Asian man; the pistol’s grip frame reads THE CHINESE MUST GO.
In this way, “All Directions” lives up to its name, presenting the ugly and the possible alike: the burdens of exile, the sacrifices of leaving, the gamble of chance, the sadness of dislocation, the loss in diaspora, the hope that a safer life can be achieved, the bettering or worsening that can happen when you leave. “We want to share all different kinds of stories around the theme of migration,” Kremers says, “but we don’t want to give you the answers.”