Angels of Amsterdam is a free, 30-minute volumetric VR experience that places you inside a meticulously recreated 17th-century Amsterdam café, where four women — Maritgen Jans, Juliana, Elsje Christiaens, and Pussy Sweet — share episodes from their lives through song, dance, and direct address. The characters respond to your eye contact. You are their audience, their witness, and implicitly their judge.

The work was created by Anna Abrahams, filmmaker and VR programmer at the EYE Film Museum and teacher at the Royal Academy of Art in Amsterdam, and Avinash Changa, founder of WeMakeVR. It had its world premiere in the VR Expanded section of the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021, becoming the first Dutch VR work ever selected for Venice's official competition. The Steam release followed in December 2022.

The experience is not comfortable viewing, and it is not meant to be. The Dutch Golden Age — the era of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the VOC trade empire — rested on the labour of thousands of women like Maritgen and Juliana, whose poverty, marginalisation and exploitation made the wealth of the city possible. Angels of Amsterdam makes this visible with a directness that no textbook achieves.

One of the four women, Elsje Christiaens, offers an unusual bridge between this VR experience and canonical Dutch art history. Elsje was a young Danish servant girl executed in Amsterdam in January 1664 for the murder of her landlady. After her execution, her body was displayed on a scaffold at the city gates as a deterrent, where it remained for several months.

Rembrandt van Rijn made two pen-and-ink drawings of Elsje's executed body during this period. The sketches are now held in museum collections in New York and Paris. They are among the very few instances where Rembrandt documented a specific named woman outside of commissioned portraiture — and the subject is a executed criminal displayed as a public spectacle.