About


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>> Gerald Van Der Kaap is an Amsterdam-based artist, who participated in some of the key moments of media art, without ever fully pausing for very long in any one of them. Since the early 80s he uses photography to access the entire field of media in the era of its digital reproducibility: (digital) photography, video, trash tv, a dadaïst CD-Rom, books, clubnights, electronic music, internet, mobile phones, and more recently an experimental feature film made in China: Beyond Index.

In 1979 he co-founded the art/photography magazine ZIEN of which he was both editor and publisher. In 1989 he founded BLIND. It’s a magazine. In the mid-1980s he also contributed articles and reviews to Artforum, Printletter and Effects: Magazine for New Art Theory.

From 1987 until 1988 he worked as a director/producer/editor for Rabotnik TV, a former pirate TV station broadcasting on Amsterdam cable, which was run entirely by artists. The primary aim was not to inform or entertain, but rather to generate autonomous works of art on TV. The 1987-1988 season has been acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

In 1993 he created the dadaïst, interactive CD-ROM entitled BlindRom v.0.9, which was the first of its kind and very influential because of its wayward interface design and structure. It won him first prize at the VideoFest that was staged in conjunction with the Berlinale: an anarchic intervention into interactive technology, a kaleidoscopic and fragmentary work in which the personal and social combine.

Kaap’s photographic and videoworks have been the subject of numerous exhibitions including two solo shows at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Canon’s Artlab 2, Tokyo; Kunsthaus Graz; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Guangdong Museum of Art. <<