#5: Eye(s) Open

For the project Eye(s) Open: New Perspectives on Colonial Film Heritage, Eye invited eleven artists to intervene in their collection of approximately 2,000 colonial-era films spanning the Dutch East Indies and Suriname.

Artists reckon with the ethical risks and capacities of engaging with a colonial film archive. From different geographic positions, they examine the role of the camera and the moving image in instantiating power. Taking radically differing approaches, they also show how these technologies can be upended to acknowledge the ruthlessness of these films while honouring the lives of those registered in their images and sounds.

Hicham Khalidi and Judith Öfner will discuss the curation of this project and show excerpts of the works made by the artists. The talk will be moderated by Leenke Ripmeester, curator at Eye Filmmuseum.

Guests

Hicham Khalidi (1972) has been the director of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht since 2018. In 2024, Khalidi curated the Dutch entry for the 60th Venice Biennale. From 2015 to 2018, he worked as an associate curator at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris. He has also served as the curator of the group exhibition “ACT II” for the Sharjah Biennale in Beirut in 2017, as cultural attaché of the Sydney Biennale in 2016, and as chief curator of the Marrakech Biennale in 2014. As a curator, Khalidi is interested in the contexts and conditions of contemporary art and art-institutional practices, and how they are affected by the climate emergency, the accumulation of crises, and processes of colonialism. He considers curatorship to be working in service of and in coalition with others.

Judith Öfner is an independent art and design project lead, exhibition maker and curator. She has worked for institutions such as Mondriaan Fund, Van Eesteren Museum, Eye Filmmuseum and Dutch Design Week. In 2025, she published Sudah _on heritage, art, cooking and family; a book, podcast and digital platform about cooking as memory, silence as survival, and about what gets lost when stories are never passed on. Currently, she is making an exhibition with textile artist and activist Claudy Jongstra at museum Cuypershuis in Roermond, celebrating 30 years of Studio Claudy Jongstra.