Hilde Van Gelder is an environmental art researcher. She creates an experimental body of work that aims to be as regenerative and harmless as is possible today. Her practice explores the force of the defenseless and seeks to intervene with resilience. Throughout this ongoing process, she investigates how writing and visual art − especially photography and painting − can be an operative force for both re-legitimating and imagining fundamental rights today.
She is a professor of Contemporary Art History in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), where she is at present Chair of the Research Unit Archaeology, Art History, and Musicology. She is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture.
Ground Sea is an archive for Hilde Van Gelder’s publication Ground Sea. Photography and the Right to Be Reborn, an interdisciplinary publication that links photography, field research, and political philosophy in a meditation on migration, climate change and fundamental rights. The website shares visual work, essays, reflections, and the processes that shaped the book.
www.groundsea.be
De Blinkerd is a space for editorial and curatorial projects that bring together different disciplines in visual art research and practice.
www.deblinkerd.be
The Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture was founded by Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder in 2004. In 2008, Alexander Streitberger and Hilde Van Gelder became its directors. Since then, the LGC is a joint collaboration between KU Leuven and UCLouvain. The centre is based both in the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven and in the Institute of Research in Culture (INCAL) at UCLouvain.
www.lievengevaertcentre.be