IN THE BELLY (2022) is a video work that stages perception as a cyclical, embodied process. Looping movement, shifting scale and layered sound bring interior states and external surroundings into continuous exchange, so that inside and outside fold into each other.
The video works through repetition and calibrated disruption. Image and sound nearly align, then slip. A rhythm forms and suggests coherence, and the viewer is drawn into it, reaching for a resolution the work keeps deferring. The body is both subject and site of perception: a field in which orientation and disorientation occur at once. Birth and death are present as undercurrents without being depicted. Meaning loops, intensifies and returns.
IN THE BELLY is the first work in which Van Gool made the viewer’s drive toward coherence the material of the work itself, the starting point of her current research into the gaze. What the viewer is left with is the effort of orientation itself.
