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 works with the mechanism of the gaze. Perception operates like a highway toward a predetermined destination: smooth, automatic, oriented. Her work intervenes in that automatism by throwing up roadblocks, forcing detours, making the viewer take exits they did not choose to take. In the gap that opens, the mechanism that was moving fluently toward resolution becomes visible as a mechanism.

As long as the gaze operates on autopilot, it passes for reality. It doesn’t announce itself as a gaze; it presents its destination and the road to it as simply what is there. What is culturally constructed, historically loaded, selectively organized reads as neutral, as given, as fact. Making the mechanism visible exposes the gaze for what it is: a construction.

The operating logic of the work is calibrated disruption. Van Gool constructs configurations of images and image environments in which the viewer’s anticipatory system is activated and then withheld from resolution: the image approaches coherence as a limit condition. In that gap, the mechanism of expectation becomes briefly perceptible as mechanism rather than nature. The disruption is never total: the work operates in the narrow band where the viewer can still reach for resolution, where the reflex toward closure remains legible as reflex.

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. This position forms a methodological ground.

Her four active research projects form a field of inquiry, each constructing distinct research conditions for the same question: how does the gaze produce reality, and under what conditions can that mechanism be exposed?

Bio

Alida van Gool 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) — 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.

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. Her work is supported by CBK Rotterdam and het Cultuurfonds.

ABOUT

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