Barbara Wildenboer

Barbara Wildenboer is a South African artist who uses a combination of analog and digital processes to create work that mostly consists of collage, photo- and paper-construction, installation, digitally animated collage works, and book arts.

Her trademark ‘altered books’ function as narrative clues, intertexts or ‘subtitles’ accompanying the other works, referring to subject matter ranging from ancient history, archaeology and fractal geometry to psychoanalysis. The altered book series Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginable Large (2011-present) was inspired by a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges titled The Library of Babel. In this large-scale ongoing project she uses the library as a metaphor for the universe.

Wildenboer lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa, and is represented by galleries in Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, Lisbon and Luanda.
In 2011 she was nominated and subsequently selected as one of the top 20 finalists for the Sovereign African Arts Award for which she received the Public Choice Prize. She has been awarded several international residencies such as the Darat al Funun exchange residency / Unesco-Aschberg (Amman, Jordan 2006), the Al Mahatta residency (Birzeit, Palestine 2009) and the Red De Residencias Artisticas Local (Bogotá, Colombia 2011), the Rimbun Dahan artist residency (Penang, Malaysia 2013), L'Atelier Sur Seine (Fontainebleau, France 2017), Hannacc (Barcelona, Spain 2018) and Le Jardin Rouge at the Montresso Foundation (Marrakech, Morocco 2022).

Submitted by Everard Read