In Job Koelewijn: Try and See It Your Way there are no sculptures or artefacts to contemplate. Instead, the building itself becomes the object of the show.

A running shutter shifts light and shadow in one room; a ‘cinema’ takes for its film the comings and goings at the gallery entrance; and an aperture gives a view through the gallery wall. The installations connect inside and outside, entering and leaving, seeing and being seen, uncovering moments that ordinarily remain hidden.

Koelewijn not only allows us to see more of what is already there, but also brings into our consciousness a sense of being in the space. The work explores the unseeing nature of our everyday looking, by amplifying and focusing our visual experience. In a kind of unveiling of vision, Koelewijn makes the eye conscious by surprising it and confounding its expectations.

The desire to stir and waken vision through new modes of seeing can be traced throughout the history of the eye in modern art – from the illicit eye stealing an unseen glance through the peephole; the scientific eye, wanting to see the unseeable through prisms, telescopes and microscopes; the dreaming eye dazzled by magic lanterns and kaleidoscopes; the idealising eye coveting enhanced realities in vanitas and flower-paintings.

The preoccupation with heightened vision in the history of art forms the basis of a series of talks to accompany the exhibition. These talks explore contemporary practices, traditions in Dutch art, and developments in ocular science, to examine the manipulation of vision in artistic practice.