Eleven artists disrupt the 'Eurocentric lens' of Dutch colonial film archives

In the exhibition Eye(s) Open – New Perspectives on Colonial Film Heritage, eleven artists respond to the Eye Filmmuseum’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. Anyone who looks around can still see the traces of the Dutch colonial past. That past manifests itself in everyday things such as the rubber of our car tyres and the chocolate sprinkles on our bread. But our visual memory, too, is saturated with it. 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 These are images of regions as they were seen and recorded by the occupying power: historical documents that, from a Eurocentric