Gerald van der Kaap (1964)
Gerald van der Kaap has experimented with many things. He takes photographs, produces computer images, has directed television programmes, produced magazines, makes music and designs art for public spaces. In the nineteen eighties, he pushed the boundaries of photography by experimenting with staged photographs and video art. As VJ '00-Kaap,' he was one of the first to mix live images and sound at parties and festivals in the Netherlands.
The artist approaches his image archive in the same way: it is a collection of 'samples' for new work, not only his own photos, but also images the artist has come across, which Kaap uses to build new images - not unlike the coloured blocks making up the broadcast test frame (a motif that, incidentally, recurs in Kaap's videos and photographs). In 1991, he transformed a number of halls in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam into virtual spaces for his work, filling one hall with raging waves, had someone diving into a hall full of water in another and in a third, had a woman floating in a vacuum. In 2002, Van der Kaap spent several months as artist-in-residence on the campus of the university of Xiamen, China, creating images of situations on and around the campus, developing a video project with students and organising an outdoor party. The photographs he produced in this period, such as Fang & Limei (Kiss), Xiamen, likewise hover above the fine line between fiction and reality.
