Eye(s) Open

A bold, multivoiced exploration of the potential for film to expose, challenge and heal the legacies of colonialism

In this volume, 11 artists are invited 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. With radically differing approaches, they show how these technologies can be subverted and used to acknowledge the ruthlessness of these films while honoring the lives of those "captured" in their images and sounds. Eye(s) Open features the perspectives of these 11 artists, alongside artistic and scholarly contributions that offer, by turns, tender, forceful, scholarly and poetic responses to a violent history and its ongoing consequences.
Artists include: Paula Albuquerque, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Esther Figueroa, Sabine Groenewegen, Eline Jongsma & Kel O'Neill, Miranda Pennell, Jameisha Prescod, Afrian Purnama, Riar Rizaldi & Mahardika Yudha.