“We keep trying to close narrative and perceptual loops, and reality becomes the decor to that. We convince ourselves it’s reality, but it’s usually our own story, pushed as fact. Personally and collectively, the most privileged story becomes the real one.”
Alida van Gool constructs composite image assemblies from found photographic material: bodies, (Western) landscape traditions and archival documents. This material constructs the permanent: territories where cultural coherence is deeply naturalized, where the constructed insistently presents itself as given. Working across printed image assemblies, video and installation, she preserves rather than conceals the seams between fragments, setting competing visual regimes in tension without resolving them.
