"Keep Your Eyes Open" or KYEO, 2025
14:02

In the video work "Keep Your Eyes Open", a moment of everyday childhood is captured. The children shown are those whose presence, in other contexts, would instinctively make us hold our belongings more tightly. Here, however, they give us vivid emotional experiences. Playful and somber, noisy, demanding, and intensely curious about the surrounding world, they engage with unfamiliar people, treating them as oversized animated toys. They climb on them, pull faces, and occasionally snatch at objects, turning it into a game of tag. This form of "contact" arises through the distance created by the camera, which opens a frontier space for the gaze of the Other. Through the screen, the viewer can safely look at those whom adults often use to earn money. The work invites a confrontation with uncomfortable affects and the possibility of enduring them, leading toward a form of connection, even if mediated by the screen. At its core lies an absurd reversal: the necessity of constructing a “safe space” for the adult observer, raising the question of who, in fact, needs safety more - an adult or a child.