Yes, These Eyes Are the Windows

From 1873 to 1874, when he was nineteen years old, Vincent van Gogh lived in London. He worked for an art dealer and took lodgings in a modest terraced housed in Brixton.

The film Yes, These Eyes Are the Windows proposes to revisit the strange history of this house at 87 Hackford Road, which today bears a plaque commemorating Vincent’s stay.

Originally created in 2014 as a site-specific audio installation, the project Yes, These Eyes Are the Windows presents itself here as a video piece with an abstract and fluid composition. In this fictional film, Van Gogh’s former home becomes a narrator made of brick and wood, who tells a non-linear story about the ghostly presence of the artist and about the layers of myth that have settled upon the house since 1970. 

Exhibition curators: Bice Curiger and Julia Marchand

Saskia Olde Wolbers’ biography

Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers, born in 1971 and living in the UK, has been working with video since the mid-1990s. 

Her short productions are meticulously elaborated microcosms that blend fictional scenarios, documentary facts and fantastical environments. Sustained by a narrative that is delivered – anonymously and out of sync – by an off-screen voice, and which attests to the artist’s fascination with the transmission of histories, these videos mirror the question as to the credibility of today’s profusion of information. Simultaneously aerial and aquatic, Saskia Olde Wolbers’s fluid universe oscillates between utopia and nightmare: like images in a darkroom, these stories prove to be at once reality and illusion.

Represented in numerous museums, collections, galleries and public spaces, Saskia Olde Wolbers has won multiple awards.

Photo credits: Yes, These Eyes are the Windows, 2015, 18 min HD video for projection. Voice over Tom Brooke © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition

Saskia Olde Wolbers, Yes These Eyes Are the Windows

Click here to buy online