September 4, 2024
Art Craft
Jackie Andres

An African Survey.” All images © Barbara Wildenboer

While heavy, hardcover reference books often embody prestige and historical value, the comprehensive volumes also carry an air of intellectual overload. Filled from cover to cover with extensive and complex concepts, the tomes beckon the Paradox of Knowledge, which states that the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know.

This vexing liminal space between the known and unknown is a driving force for Barbara Wildenboer’s work. The Cape Town-based artist (previously) sources secondhand books that span a wide range of languages, worldviews, and subjects such as philosophy, art, history, music, biology, archaeology, and more. Fascinated by linguistics and systems of writing, Wildenboer aims to decode the ways that we assign meaning to symbols. […]

“Genesis”

“After Beethoven”

“On the Philosophy of History”

More: Sliced Slivers Emanate from Barbara Wildenboer’s Altered Books — Colossal