BREAKING #289

A six star review

Nicole Ex

Column

November 2025

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

November 2025

I give it six stars. I don’t hand out celestial bodies lightly, but I’m so pleasantly surprised that this time I do so with joy. There was mild resistance, a trace of reluctance, when I first heard about Fenix, the new museum on migration in Rotterdam – a topic that causes so much global headache and political conflict that I felt I’d had enough of it.

So perhaps it’s relief that makes me euphoric. Or the incomparable daylight streaming through the windows and skylights. Or those panes overlooking energetic, harbour-city Rotterdam. Or perhaps it’s the flowing character of this beautifully renovated 1923 warehouse, where everything merges into one continuous movement.

What Fenix breathes through its very fibres is that everyone forges their own path, crossing borders, moving, searching, travelling. This shifting nature is inherent to us, as it was to those who came before and those who will follow. The opening exhibition All Directions takes its motto from artist Efrat Zehavi: ‘To know where we are going, we must first know where we come from.’

We too fan out in all directions – husband, sons, and I. We navigate the space (which has no fixed route, rooms or chambers), cross paths and drift apart, only to discover upon reuniting that each of us has seen entirely different things. Of course, there are shared highlights, but it’s the sum of all our experiences that creates the real synergy.

All Directions is a journey through art that tells intimate, friction-filled stories, woven together into our universal fate of being uprooted and finding home again. Without moralising. Without heavy words. Fenix, instead, offers a profound sense of freedom – transcending or sidestepping borders in every expression: in its architecture, its curatorial vision, its people and its food.

And I haven’t even mentioned that ingenious staircase by architect Ma Yansong. After such a glowing invitation, it might disappoint at first glance, but I promise you’ll come around. Just go, pick a sunny day and take your friends with you.