From 17 September to 23 December 2026, LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery in Abidjan presents Invasive Archives, an exhibition by Barbara Wildenboer.
The gallery frames the show around a precise question: how do systems of classification continue to shape our understanding of landscapes and histories? Archives here are treated not as dusty repositories but as living ecologies, places where knowledge and power circulate.
The subject resonates far beyond the gallery walls. Botanical naming, colonial inventories and the language used to sort plants, places and peoples have long determined what is seen as native or invasive, valuable or disposable. An exhibition that turns those systems into material for art invites visitors to question the categories they inherit.
For Abidjan, the show confirms a gallery scene that programmes international artists while building long relationships with Ivorian ones — the same gallery presented Obou Gbais’s The Invisible City earlier this year.
