HAPPENING 10-12 APRIL 2026 – Artsen zonder Grenzen is bringing Humans in Transit to Fenix this month, a three-day exhibition built around refugee testimonies, art, film and theatre. On Plein at Fenix, the project will place migration stories front and centre in a city that already understands how movement, arrival and displacement shape people’s lives.
The exhibition is based on 400 testimonies from people on the move and aims to show the human reality behind migration routes that often remain abstract in public debate. According to Artsen zonder Grenzen, the project draws attention to experiences gathered in places that are usually hard to see or easy to ignore, including detention centres, at sea and along Europe’s borders.
Rather than speaking about refugees from a distance, Humans in Transit is framed around the principle “nothing about us, without us”. The project has been made by and for refugees, and that gives the exhibition a different kind of weight. It is not just about representation, but about who gets to tell the story in the first place.
Art, testimony and migration
For Rotterdam, the setting matters. Fenix is the city’s museum about migration, and Plein is described by the museum as a place where communities come together and Rotterdam speaks in its own voice. That makes it a fitting space for an exhibition that is less interested in distance and statistics than in lived experience and human presence.
The exhibition looks directly at the conditions people face along migration routes and also serves as a tribute to lives lost on the journey. Artsen zonder Grenzen says the 400 stories included here are still only a fraction of the many experiences that go unheard, which is part of the point. Even in a compact exhibition, the scale of what is missing remains visible.
The visual side of Humans in Transit comes from a group of artists with their own international backgrounds: Ngadi Smart from Sierra Leone, Tawab Safi from Afghanistan, Barly Tshibanda from Congo and Souad Kokash from Syria. The poster for the exhibition presents the project as “Stories from refugees in Libya and on the Mediterranean (2015-25)”, giving the Rotterdam edition a clear documentary frame as well as an artistic one.
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Why this matters in Rotterdam
Rotterdam is already a city where migration is part of the texture of daily life, not an abstract theme parked somewhere outside the centre. That does not automatically make difficult migration stories easier to absorb, but it does make Fenix a particularly meaningful place to host them.
For visitors, this sounds less like a conventional museum stop and more like something you make time for because the subject asks for it. The exhibition runs for just three days, from 10 to 12 April 2026, and will be freely accessible on Plein at Fenix.
How to get there
Plein is at Fenix on Katendrecht. Fenix’s main visitor address is Paul Nijghkade 5, 3072 AN Rotterdam, but the museum advises visitors heading specifically to Plein to use the entrance at Dolf Henkesplein 1. The site is easy to reach from Wilhelminaplein by public transport, and it also makes sense as part of a walk through Wilhelminapier and Katendrecht.
