Eye(s) Open: New Perspectives on Film Heritage from Colonial Times invites eleven artists to respond to the Eye Filmmuseum’s collection of approximately 2,000 films originating from formerly colonized areas in Indonesia and Suriname. The exhibition explores 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.