Exhibitions

In our large exhibition space, you can visit the temporary exhibition, where leading artists explore the intersection of visual art and cinema. On the ground floor and spread throughout the building, you can visit the permanent exhibition, What is Film?. Through collection items and installations, you will become acquainted with the development of film, from the past to the present.

In an overgrown field, the head of a white horse pops up from behind lush, overgrown greenery. In the background there is the facade of wooden houses that have seen better days.

Janis Rafa, Landscape Depressions, 2023. Film still, single-channel video with sound, 25 min. Courtesy the artist © Janis Rafa

Janis Rafa – Feed me. Cheat me. Eat me.

14 October 2023 through 7 January 2024, Eye Filmmuseum presents a solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Janis Rafa. Spoken language rarely features in her evocative films and video installations; she focuses instead on the silent presence of tamed or wild animals – dogs, horses, birds, etc. – allowing them to become the leading force within her poetic compositions.

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A teen plays with film equipment in the permanent presentation

Permanent exhibition What is Film?

Various moving image components are highlighted on the ground floor and throughout the building. Browse through Eye's unique collection or make your own flip book or animated film.

Expected in 2023

Take a look at the exhibitions coming soon.

still from Echos aus einem düsteren Reich (Werner Herzog, DE 1990)

Werner Herzog – The Ecstatic Truth

Werner Herzog has fascinated audiences for more than fifty years. In his search for the 'ecstatic truth', Herzog stylises images to reveal a deeper level of truth.

In a still from Saodat Ismailova's Two Horizons, two hilltops feature in a midnight-blue landscape, one in the front and one further back. A shining star is right above the hill furthest back.

Saodat Ismailova, Two Horizons, 2017. Two channel HD video installation, 24 min., colour, 4.1 surround. Courtesy of Saodat Ismailova and Le Fresnoy

Saodat Ismailova – 18 000 Worlds

In her first retrospective exhibition 18,000 Worlds, Saodat Ismailova guides us into the hidden world of myth and ritual in Central Asia.

Fiona Tan, Gray Glass (2020), still, 3 channel 4K video installation, black & white, 3 x mono, courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Fiona Tan – Mountains and Molehills

How do we hold on to memories – in archives, in the mind, in the landscape, on film? Visual artist and filmmaker Fiona Tan investigates ways in which we record the world around us.

Meriem Bennani, Kahlil Joseph, Karrabing Film Collective

The work of the three recent winners of the Eye Art & Film Prize, who effortlessly cross the boundaries between cinema, documentary, and visual arts.

Guido van der Werve, Nummer vier, I don't want to get involved in this. I don’t want to be part of this. Talk me out of it, 2005, courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York

Guido van der Werve – Palpable Futility

The first retrospective exhibition of work by Guido van der Werve. In his universe, romanticism, nature and the sublime are never far away.

Antonioni Project (after Michelangelo Antonioni) (2009) © Jan Versweyveld

All About Film About Theatre – Ivo van Hove & Jan Versweyveld

Film-to-stage adaptations synthesize theatre with film, live video, and music.

campaign image Vive le cinéma!, work by Leopold Emmen

Vive le cinéma! Art & Film

Exhibition with spatial film art by five important directors

Waiting for the Time to Pass

To celebrate Eye's 75th anniversary, we asked seven artists we have worked with o exhibitions in the past to provide a film work for a digital exhibition.

Ali Cherri, The Disquiet

Trembling Landscapes

Eye Filmmuseum presents a group exhibition that explores landscape with some of the Arab world’s most prominent artists who work with film and video.

campaign image Chantal Akerman - Passages, still from Hotel Monterey

Chantal Akerman – Passages

Major solo exhibition of work by Chantal Akerman, who rose to fame in the 1970s as a feminist avant-garde filmmaker, who later discovered the possibilities of the art gallery.

Children's Game 10 (Francis Alÿs)

Francis Alÿs – Children's Games

A major exhibition of work by the Belgian-Mexican artist Francis Alÿs, who is best-known for his playful videos that are both engaged and poetic.

William Kentridge, 10 Drawings for Projection, Other Faces (2011)

William Kentridge – Ten Drawings for Projection

In 2015, William Kentridge donated 10 Drawings for Projection to Eye Filmmuseum. Illuminating the eventful history of South Africa, these films are part of a larger installation.

Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (SU 1983)

Andrei Tarkovsky – The Exhibition

Exhibition and film programme devoted to the celebrated filmmaker and mystic, focusing specifically on Tarkovsky’s quest for existential truth.

Chia-Wei Hsu, Drones, Frosted Bats and the Testimony of the Deceased (2017)

A Tale of Hidden Histories

Truth, facts, memories, reality: are they all constructions? The artists in this group exhibition deploy many different types of media to investigate and ‘unmask’ the past.

Jan Svankmajer – The Alchemical Wedding

Steaks, pebbles, iron locks: master animator Jan Švankmajer can bring anything to life in works of obsession, horror and eroticism underpinned by an undercurrent of abuse of power.

Ryoji Ikeda, Datamatics

Ryoji Ikeda

Visual artist and a key figure in the world of electronic music Ikeda created a spectacular presentation of his overwhelmingly immersive audiovisual artworks specially for Eye.

Alex van Warmerdam – L'histoire kaputt

At the invitation of Eye Filmmuseum, Alex van Warmerdam presents an exhibition with new films, installations and objects. Film, theatre, design and painting come together.

Hito Steyerl, Liquidity, Inc. (2014)

Hito Steyerl, Ben Rivers, Wang Bing – Eye Art & Film Prize

Highlighting this Eye Art & Film Prize, this exhibition featured work by the first three winners, all of whom share a socially engaged approach to their art.

Jesper Just, Intercourses

Jesper Just

Solo exhibition by Jesper Just, who caused a stir with cinematographic works in which he explores gender, desires, relations and identity in a refined visual idiom.

campaign image Locus: Apichatpong Weerasethaku - Cao Guimaraes

Locus: Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Cao Guimarães

Exhibition of work by prominent film artists Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Cao Guimarães. Their celebrated work evokes a world that blends dream, sensory experience and reality.

Martin Scorsese – The Exhibition

Exhibition devoted to one of the most important American film directors of the past half-century: Martin Scorsese.

Béla Tarr – Till the End of the World

Béla Tarr is a master of the magnificent long take, a master of wonderfully shot, melancholic films that express the human condition.

campaign image Celluloid, work by Tacita Dean

Celluloid – Tacita Dean, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Rosa Barba, Gibson & Recoder

International group exhibition featuring work by artists who use and reflect on the qualities of 16mm and 35mm film stock and the cinematic apparatus.

Master of Light – Robby Müller

Major exhibition devoted to the Netherlands’ most famous director of photography, Robby Müller.

Close-Up – A New Generation of Film and Video Artists in the Netherlands

Group exhibition featuring work by a new generation of filmmakers and artists in the Netherlands, who are breaking down the barriers between film, video and visual art.

Michelangelo Antonioni – Il maestro del cinema moderno

Exhibition about one of the foremost innovators in film from the last century, who renewed the grammar of film by thinking in terms of the image and less in terms of narrative.

William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015)

William Kentridge – If We Ever Get to Heaven

Exhibition featuring work by the celebrated South African artist William Kentridge, who achieved renown with his remarkable animation films, charcoal drawings and installations.

Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory

With the exhibition Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, Eye opened up one of its treasure troves, inviting you to step into the dream world of the early years of cinema.

Anthony McCall – Solid Light Films and Other Works

Since the 1970s, McCall has produced a remarkable body of work that includes, among other media, large-scale light-projection installations, so-called ‘solid light films’.

David Cronenberg – The Exhibition

Major exhibition focusing on director David Cronenberg, who acquired cult status with his idiosyncratic films about the relationship between body, mind, technology and mass media.

Cinema Remake – Art & Film

Exhibition with work of filmmakers and artists who use iconic feature films as a basis with which to create something radically new.

The Quay Brothers' Universum

Exhibition featuring the enigmatic and dark body of work of the Quay Brothers that includes stop-motion animation, drawings, and performing arts productions.

Péter Forgács – Looming Fire

Based on Eye’s extensive collection of home movies, Forgács takes us through everyday life in the Netherlands East Indies at the height of the colonial period.

still from La dolce vita (Federico Fellini, IT/FR 1960)

Fellini – The Exhibition

Focusing on one of the most image-defining masters of post-war Italian cinema, Fellini – The Exhibition unravels the filmmaker’s universe.

Johan van der Keuken – Up to the Light

The exhibition focused on the extraordinary way in which Van der Keuken brought together contrasting images in his films and observed a world in constant transition.

campaign image Oskar Fischinger – Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) – Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction

Exhibition on the German-American avant-garde filmmaker who was highly influential in the development of the animation film and who remains a source of inspiration for animators.

still from Saint Sebastian (Fiona Tan, 2001)

Expanded Cinema – Isaac Julien, Fiona Tan, Yang Fudong

With their works in this exhibition, the participating artists demonstrated that film doesn’t just belong in the cinema.

still from A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Stanley Kubrick – The Exhibition

Comprehensive exhibition on one of the most influential directors of the 20th century, the genius behind films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.

still from Kristall (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, 2006)

Found Footage – Cinema Exposed

The exhibition showed how artists and filmmakers make use of the nearly inexhaustible reservoir of images that can be found in film archives, on the Internet, TV and DVD.

Francis Alÿs – Children’s Games, exhibition, 2020 (photo Studio Hans Wilschut)

Eye Art & Film Prize

Every year since 2015, Eye has awarded the Eye Art & Film Prize to an artist who operates on the interface between visual art and film. This annual prize is intended towards the creation of new work that is also shown in Eye.