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.”

Van Gool’s practice centers on one question: how does the human gaze, shaped by inherited ways of looking, construct what we experience as reality, and what becomes visible when that construction is interrupted? The gaze, when unchallenged, operates like driving on a highway toward a predetermined destination: smooth, automatic, directed. The route is laid out in advance by Western image traditions and their genres, such as the nude and the landscape, by the visual economies of fashion, advertising and pornography, and by the settings in which images are shown. Her work intervenes in that automatism by throwing up roadblocks and forcing the viewer’s perception to take detours. As long as the gaze operates on autopilot, it passes for reality; making that mechanism visible exposes it as a construction.

The work operates through a calibrated play of seduction and disruption. Van Gool uses culturally laden images, whose meaning has been fixed through history, subject, convention and circulation, and configures them so that the viewer’s drive toward coherence is activated and then withheld, precisely enough that the viewer keeps reaching. The anonymized female body runs through all of the work as the material of that play: the image Western visual culture has persistently organized for the gaze.

Van Gool holds a dual formation in image-making and in the historical, political and economic conditions that determine the meaning of art and images. Formed within Western image culture, she examines the gazes it produces: who looks, who is looked at, what that looking produces, whose reality gets to count. She does so from a position within: as a woman, as an artist, as a mother.

Bio

Alida van Gool (1986) is a Rotterdam-based visual artist working across printed image assemblies, installation, video and online contexts. She holds a degree in Conceptual Imagery from the Fotoacademie Amsterdam (2022) and a BA and MA in Arts and Cultural Sciences from Erasmus University Rotterdam (2012).

She has exhibited across the Netherlands at Huis van de Fotografie Rotterdam, Pennings Foundation, Garage Rotterdam and Art The Hague, among others, and her work has been included in international publications including GUP New Talent, Der Greif and Fresh Eyes. Three of her works are held in the collection of Stichting Droom & Daad. Her work is supported by Stichting Droom & Daad, CBK Rotterdam and het Cultuurfonds.

ABOUT

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