Rear Window, 2008

 

Rear Window was developed for the exhibition Becoming Dutch at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.

 

After moving to Amsterdam in 1998, I became fascinated by something that seemed very ordinary to people around me: the open curtains of ground-floor apartments. From the street, it was possible to look directly into private interiors. At first I read this as a sign of openness, almost as a cultural statement—nothing to hide, nothing to conceal.

 

But the longer I lived in the Netherlands, the more complicated this impression became.

 

What was visible through the windows often seemed carefully composed. I would see small domestic scenes that appeared almost too complete: furniture, lamps, plants, objects arranged in a particular way. Sometimes they reminded me of music boxes—intimate, attractive, perfectly staged, but also slightly mechanical.

 

I became interested in the contradiction between visibility and access. The interiors were open to view, yet that did not mean that the private world behind the window was actually available to me. I could look, but I remained outside.

 

At some point I began photographing these interiors with a telephoto lens. I did not photograph from the street. Instead, I asked acquaintances if I could use their windows to look into neighbouring apartments. This shifted the position of observation: I was inside one private space while looking into another.

 

The title Rear Window refers to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film, but the project was less about surveillance than about the unstable boundary between curiosity, intimacy and social permission. As an immigrant, I was trying to understand a culture partly by observing how people inhabited their domestic spaces.

 

I printed the photographs as silkscreens on newsprint. The printing process reduced detail and made the images less immediately legible. From a distance they appeared clear; up close they dissolved into dots and fragments.

 

For the installation, the photographs were dispersed through a darkened space. Visitors received small flashlights and had to search for the images themselves. The act of looking therefore became part of the work. Instead of simply viewing photographs on a wall, visitors moved through the space, searching, approaching and trying to identify what they were seeing.

 

Gradually, the images revealed themselves as views into private homes.

 

What interested me was the moment when looking stopped feeling neutral. The visitor became aware of their own position as observer, and of the uneasiness involved in looking into someone else’s private world.

 

For me, Rear Window was also about trying to understand the Netherlands from a position of partial belonging. The open curtains suggested transparency, but the photographs revealed something more ambiguous: a culture could make itself visually accessible while remaining socially difficult to enter.