EYE(S) Open

 
Reframing the colonial gaze: Eye(s) Open confronts and transforms colonial-era film archives to reveal new ways of seeing power, history and memory
 
A bold, multi-voiced exploration of how film can expose, challenge and heal the legacies of colonialism
 
Accompanies the exhibition Eye(s) Open at the Eye Filmmuseum (opening on 13 March 2026)
 
 
Eye(s) Open: New Perspectives on Film Heritage from Colonial Times invites eleven artists to respond to the Eye Filmmuseum’s collection of approximately 2,600 colonial-era films spanning the Dutch East Indies, Suriname and the Antilles. The artists explore the ethical risks and capacities of engaging with a colonial film archive.
 
From different geographic positions, they examine the role of the camera and moving image in instantiating power. Taking radically differing approaches, they also show how these technologies can be subverted to acknowledge the ruthlessness of these films while honouring the lives of those “captured” in their images and sounds.
 
Eye(s) Open features the perspectives of the eleven artists, alongside artistic and scholarly contributions that offer, by turns, tender, forceful, scholarly and poetic responses to a violent history and its ongoing consequences.