In the exhibition Eye(s) open, eleven artists respond to Eye’s collection of some 2,000 colonial-era films from formerly occupied regions in Indonesia and Suriname.

The artists have created ten new works based on these films. In doing so, they expose colonial structures and practices and question the role of the camera in perpetuating power.

Eye’s archive contains films from the colonial period that bear witness to this history. These are images of regions as they were seen and recorded by the occupying power: historical documents that, from a Eurocentric perspective, contributed to the maintenance of an oppressive system. The eleven artists, from a range of countries, spent two years researching an eclectic array of often problematic images.

A selection

The Indonesian artist Riar Rizaldi offers a new perspective on phantom ride films, a genre from the early twentieth century in which a camera mounted on a moving locomotive records the passing landscape. In his film installation Tropenkolder, Rizaldi uses re-enactment to bring to life the experience of a group of Javanese railway workers whose unseen labour made such films possible.

The Dutch-American duo Jongsma + O'Neill (Eline Jongsma and Kel O'Neill) took an experimental approach, collaborating on the AI-based installation entitled Dominion, which depicts what never-filmed encounters between Dutch Catholic missionaries and the local population of the island of Flores might have looked like.

The multi-channel film installation What we inherit by the British artist Jameisha Prescod adopts a more essayistic tone. It explores Black Surinamese spiritual responses to illness and examines how colonial ideas about Black bodies have helped shape healthcare for Afro-Surinamese and Marron communities.

Participating artists

The participating artists are Paula Albuquerque (Portugal/Netherlands), Timoteus Anggawan Kusno(Indonesia), Esther Figueroa (Jamaica), Sabine Groenewegen (Netherlands), Jongsma + O'Neill (Eline Jongsma and Kel O'Neill) (Netherlands/United States), Miranda Pennell (United Kingdom), Jameisha Prescod (United Kingdom), Afrian Purnama (Indonesia), Riar Rizaldi (Indonesia) and Mahardika Yudha (Indonesia).

New perspectives

Eye(s) open offers exhibition visitors a diverse kaleidoscope of new perspectives and approaches that encourage dialogue. Eye manages its vast international film collection as a ‘Living Archive’, open to reuse and to new interpretations by makers, thinkers and researchers.