Barbara Wildenboer is a South African artist who uses various mediums to create text-based works with a focus on early forms of ‘writing’ and storytelling. Her work focuses on language, typography and the elements of writing in a non-linear manner that offers a different reading of earlier writings.

Her trademark ‘altered books’ function as narrative clues, intertexts or ‘subtitles’ accompanying the other works. Using an approach of interdisciplinary curiosity she makes reference to various subject matter such as ancient history, comparative mythology and religion, archaeology ,fractal geometry and 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 and Morocco. In 2007 she obtained a Masters in Fine Art (cum laude) from the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town. The title of her Master’s thesis was’ Present Absence / Absent Presence’, and the research was concerned with aspects of melancholy, loss and longing as is embodied by the photographic medium. Before that she completed a BA(Ed) with majors in English literature, Psychology and Pedagogics at the University of Pretoria in 1996, followed by a Bachelor of Visual Arts from UNISA in 2003. From 2009-2016 she was working as the head of the Photography Department at the CityVarsity College of Creative Arts, where she lectured Theory & Discourse and History of Photography.

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) L’Air Arts, Paris (2022), Art Omi residency (2024) and Le Jardin Rouge at the Montresso Foundation (Marrakech, Morocco 2022/23/24/25).