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 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 becomes legible as serious and desired, and what gets filed elsewhere.

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.

The practice is discovery-led. Understanding consistently trails the work — which Van Gool reads as a sign that the work is doing something. Each project constructs its own research conditions, using culturally laden material drawn from Western image traditions: bodies and landscapes, 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.

Bio

Alida van Gool is a Rotterdam-based visual artist whose practice examines how inherited modes of looking produce and stabilize reality. Working across printed image assemblies, installation, video and online contexts, she constructs configurations of images and image environments in which the viewer’s anticipatory system is activated and then withheld from resolution — making the mechanism of expectation briefly perceptible as mechanism rather than nature.

The work situates itself at the intersection of two research fields that are rarely brought into direct contact: the cognitive science of perception — how the anticipatory mind assembles reality from inherited frameworks, how expectation structures what becomes visible — and the political and feminist analysis of image culture, which asks what those frameworks have historically been loaded with, whose bodies and stories they naturalize, and what they systematically render invisible, anonymous or available. Van Gool’s practice proposes that these are not parallel arguments but the same mechanism examined from different angles: to understand how perception works is simultaneously to understand whose reality it produces.

Her different active research projects — Studies in Organization, Nelly Is Looking for Closure, FLAT_BED and Alida has a Hobby — each construct distinct research conditions for the same operative logic, together constituting a field of inquiry. 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, 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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