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‘Experience does not simply unfold; it is organized. Through composite image structures (sometimes extending into sound and temporal loops) I examine how inherited modes of looking stabilize bodies, landscapes and historical imagery into coherent hierarchies, and how those hierarchies can be suspended. The work draws viewers into recognition and then unsettles it, keeping meaning in motion.’

Alida van Gool investigates perception as a historically conditioned and culturally structured operating system. Her practice examines how images produce coherence: how bodies, landscapes and archival materials are arranged into legible hierarchies through inherited modes of looking.

Working across printed image assemblies, video and installation, Van Gool constructs composite constellations from reality-based photographic fragments. Rather than dissolving discontinuities, she intensifies them: seams remain exposed, spatial relations resist alignment and competing visual regimes coexist without resolving into a single narrative authority. The image approaches coherence but withholds its completion.

Central to the work is a confrontation with the gaze as a stabilizing force. Female bodies, Western landscape traditions and historical imagery function as culturally saturated forms through which visual authority is repeatedly secured. As an artist operating within these inherited visual cultures, Van Gool does not step outside them. Instead, she reassembles their fragments in ways that interrupt their automatic consolidation. Familiar structures of representation are displaced just enough to unsettle their inevitability.

Her practice engages with questions surrounding normative coherence and teleological closure. Through looping temporal structures and composite spatial assemblies, the work resists linear progression and fixed endpoints. Meaning does not culminate; it circulates. In this sustained near-coherence, viewers encounter their own participation in the stabilization of representation. The gaze becomes self-aware.

Through calibrated disruption rather than overt rupture, Van Gool positions image-making as a site of analytic exposure and embodied agency. By keeping discontinuity in orbit, she opens a space in which visual and historical structures remain present yet no longer operate as seamless frameworks. Authority persists, but no longer settles without friction.

Alida van Gool

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