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 is a visual artist based in Rotterdam. Her practice spans printed image assemblies, installation and video, working with photographic material to examine how inherited modes of looking produce and stabilize reality.

Van Gool 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. Her work has been included in international publications including GUP New Talent, Der Greif, L’oeil de la Photographie and Fresh Eyes. Her work is and has been supported by CBK Rotterdam and het Cultuurfonds. She was a member of the artist-driven organization Huis van de Fotografie Rotterdam.

Artist statement

Perception is not a passive registration of the world but an anticipatory act — shaped before it arrives by inherited frameworks, cultural conditioning and accumulated experience. What we see is never only what is there. It is what we have been prepared to see.

Van Gool’s practice takes this condition as its operative field. Through sustained, research-based projects — working across printed image assemblies, video, installation and other media as research tools — she examines how expectations structure perception: how image culture, privilege, compounded experience and inherited modes of looking determine what coheres as real and meaningful, what gets legible as serious and desired, and what gets filed elsewhere.

Her method is calibrated disruption. Working with images — in their entirety, as fragments, as assemblies — that are culturally laden and tied to strongly held categories: bodies and landscapes within Western image traditions, work and leisure, the sexually available and the demure, the monumental and the archival. These are territories where expectation is most deeply naturalized, where the constructed most insistently presents itself as given.

She constructs situations 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 — Van Gool works in the narrow band where the viewer can still reach for resolution, where the reflex toward closure is legible as reflex.

ABOUT

Bio

Artist statement

Exhibitions, events & publications

Education (graduated)

Grants