Alida van Gool’s practice asks how the human gaze, shaped by inherited ways of looking, constructs what we experience as reality. When unchallenged, the gaze operates like driving on a highway toward a predetermined destination: smooth, automatic, directed. As long as it runs on autopilot, it passes for reality. Her work intervenes in that automatism by throwing up roadblocks and forcing detours, so that the mechanism becomes visible as a construction.
Working across printed image assemblies, installation, video and online contexts, Van Gool uses culturally laden images in a calibrated play of seduction and disruption. The anonymized female body runs through all of the work: the image Western visual culture has persistently organized for the gaze. She examines that gaze from within, as a woman, an artist and a mother.
