ABOUT

“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.”

Bio

Alida van Gool (b. 1986, The Netherlands) is a visual artist based in Rotterdam. Her practice spans printed image assemblies, installation and video. She works primarily with found photographic material in Western image traditions, and examines how inherited modes of looking produce and stabilize reality.

Van Gool studied Conceptual Imagery at the Fotoacademie Amsterdam (graduated in 2022) and Arts and Cultural Sciences at Erasmus University Rotterdam (graduated in 2012, BA & MA) — a dual formation that grounds her work simultaneously in the construction of images and in the historical, sociological and economic conditions that determine their meaning.

Since graduating she has exhibited actively across The Netherlands, presenting at Huis van de Fotografie Rotterdam, Pennings Foundation, Garage Rotterdam and Art The Hague, among others. Her work has been included in international publications including GUP New Talent, L’oeil de la Photographie and Fresh Eyes. In 2024 she received a Praktijkbijdrage from CBK Rotterdam to further develop her work.

Artist statement

Perception is not a passive registration of the world but a historically conditioned and culturally structured operation. What coheres as reality does so not through neutrality but through repetition, authority and the suppression of competing accounts. Van Gool’s practice takes this condition as its operative field; not to illustrate it didactically, but to produce its experience as a perceptual event.

Working mostly with found photographic material produced in Western image traditions, Van Gool constructs composite image assemblies from fragments already saturated with ideological charge. Bodies, landscapes, ontological and archival imagery are the territories where cultural coherence is most aggressively naturalized, where the constructed most insistently presents itself as given. Their authority derives precisely from their ubiquity and apparent transparency.

Her practice does not dissolve this authority but suspends it. Seams are preserved rather than concealed; spatial logics are set in conflict rather than resolved; temporal structures loop rather than progress. The composite image approaches coherence as a limit condition. In sustained near-resolution, the stabilizing operations of the gaze become legible as operations rather than as nature.

The hierarchies organizing her source material — gendered, colonial, archival — are not illusions to be seen through but historically sedimented formations with continued material force. To suspend their coherence is not to negate them but to expose the contingency of their claim to inevitability. What the work asks of its viewer is not critical distance but implication. In the gap between recognition and resolution, the stabilizing function of the gaze becomes perceptible from the inside.

Alida van Gool

ABOUT

Bio

Artist statement

Exhibitions, events & publications

Education

Grants