In 2025, the first museum ‘dedicated to themes of migration through the lens of art’ will open in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Fenix will be located in the Dutch city’s harbour, in a 16,000 sqm warehouse which formerly served as an important site on the Holland America Line – a Dutch cargo and passenger line. The Holland America Line facilitated the journeys of millions of migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who arrived and departed from the surrounding docks.
The site will be restored and designed by architecture firm MAD Architects, led by Ma Yansong, in tandem with a wider regeneration project of the Rotterdam city docks area.
The museum’s inaugural exhibitions will be ‘All Directions: Art That Moves You’, a group chow of 150 works from the Fenix collection and acquired over the past five years – including works by Francis Alÿs, Cornelia Parker and Do Ho Suh; and ‘The Family of Migrants’, an exhibition, inspired by Edward Steichen’s ‘Family of Man’ (1955) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which will present 194 photographs on the subject of migration.
In a statement, the art historian and Fenix director Anne Kremers said: ‘The story of Fenix is inextricably linked to Rotterdam and its many communities; but that story is also the world’s. It is a story of arrivals and departures, and of constant change to face the future. From the crossing of the Berlin Wall, to the departure for the USA on the great steam ships, to the arrival of new communities from every part of the world to build, to create, to learn, Fenix is a mirror to the experience and the stories of people from everywhere told through the lens of art.’
Fenix is funded by the Droom en Daad Foundation, founded in 2016 and led by former Rijksmuseum director Wim Pijbes.
The museum opens 16 May 2025.
