"Forty years ago, when he first moved to Amsterdam, the artist and film director Steve McQueen would look at 17th-century cityscapes by Johannes Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum and wonder what lay behind the "random, mundane" actions depicted in them. Now he has captured the ghosts of a modern city, once occupied by the Nazis, in a 34-hour film being projected onto that same museum."
"It is the first time his film Occupied City, which explores the stories of more than 2,000 Amsterdam locations during the war years and now, is being shown as the full work of art that he intended to create. "When you see a painting, you have no idea of the context or who the people are," he told The Art Newspaper. "This is a mirror image of Amsterdam: it mirrors who we are today.""
"McQueen, who won an Oscar for his film 12 Years a Slave (2013) and rose to prominence after winning the Turner Prize in 1999, worked on this project with historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter. Stigter documented a sobering history in her book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. McQueen's images of the same locations were shot between 2020 and 2023, as the country went into Covid lockdown and witnessed both Black Lives Matter demonstrations and climate change marches."
Steve McQueen created a 34-hour film, Occupied City, that maps more than 2,000 Amsterdam locations connected to the Nazi occupation and the city's wartime history. The project was developed in collaboration with historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, whose Atlas of an Occupied City documents those sites. McQueen filmed the locations between 2020 and 2023 amid Covid lockdowns and contemporary protests. The work is projected silently and continuously onto the Rijksmuseum south façade from September 12 to January 25, 2026, and is also screened with sound and voiceover in the museum auditorium. The film interrogates surface appearances and the memory of erased communities.
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
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