Greater than a century in the past, hundreds of thousands of individuals attempting to flee poverty, persecution or warfare in Europe boarded ships within the harbor of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for a trans-Atlantic journey to a brand new life.
Right this moment, individuals can enter a former warehouse there, climb a winding staircase and look out from a cantilevered viewing deck onto the spot the place the ships carrying these individuals as soon as set sail.
That is Fenix, an art museum devoted to the theme of migration that opens to the general public on Friday. A once-derelict pier stockroom has been reworked into an expansive white-box artwork area and is topped with a sophisticated metal double-helix swirl that provides a particular architectural signature to Rotterdam’s skyline.
“It’s all about motion,” mentioned Wim Pijbes, the chairman of the muse that runs the brand new museum. “It’s not genealogical, it’s not artwork historic, it’s not documentary. It’s a mixture of objects: excessive artwork, low artwork, private objects, video, movie, pictures, ceramics. It’s all there, like a symphony.”
In contrast to different migration museums in New York, London or Paris, which generally narrate particular histories of immigrants and refugees, Fenix takes a distinct, extra wide-ranging, method.
Guests first encounter two small exhibitions downstairs — one showcasing photojournalistic pictures and the opposite stuffed with 1000’s of battered suitcases — that underscore the concept migration is an integral a part of a common human expertise. The principle exhibition, “All Instructions,” put in in a 75,000-square-foot concrete and glass corridor upstairs, shows tremendous artwork that both immediately or obliquely makes reference to that have.
