After Babel exhibition at annexM reimagines books through 25 artists' works

After Babel, curated by Anna Kafetsi, ran from 5 December to 10 March at annexM in Athens, Greece. The exhibition, part of a trilogy titled 'The Unwritten Library', drew inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 short story 'The Library of Babel'. It featured works by 25 artists, including Nina Papaconstantinou's Mourning Diary (2016), which uses black ink to fill spaces between words in Roland Barthes's 1977 text. Ulises Carrión's 36-minute video Bookworks Revisited (1986) presented his archive of artist books as an artwork itself. Michael Mandiberg's Print Wikipedia (2009–16) visualized the online encyclopedia's content printed on wallpaper, while Benny Brunner's film The Great Book Robbery (2007–2012) documented 70,000 books looted from Palestinian refugees in 1948, held in the National Library of Israel. The exhibition layout mirrored Borges's labyrinthine library, exploring books beyond mere text dissemination. It emphasized material absences, cultural revolutions, and symbolic loss, moving from systematic principles to a multitude of voices.