HILDE VAN GELDER

Hilde Van Gelder is professor of Contemporary Art History in the Research Unit of Art History at KU Leuven. Together with Alexander Streitberger (UCLouvain), she is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture (LGC).

Hilde spent her childhood years between the port city of Antwerp and summers of dinghy sailing on the North Sea. As in most Western-European middle-class families, photography was always around in the 1970s Van Gelder household. The prototypical Agfa and Polaroid culture of those years was her predicable introduction to the medium. But there was more. One family member, later to become a criminal court justice, was a public prosecutor specialized in murder cases. Since Belgian courthouses do not provide offices to judges, forensic files and photofits entered and left her parental home on a regular basis. As a result, Hilde was born into a world replete with a wide variety of pictures ranging from the weird to the eerie (family snaps, art photographs, crime scenes) — a rather unique foundational experience that left its decisive marks.