Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda

The Infinite Library is a slowly growing archive of books that have been selected, collected, modified, rebound and numbered by Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda. Each book they see as a new beginning with a new set of rules. While the properties and content of the books inevitably govern the point of departure, the rest of the process is intuitive, associative, subjective. Contrary to other more totalising visions of infinite or universal libraries – Jorge Luis Borges’s being among the most famous – the artists perceive their work as an “open conversation of fragments”, an endless reconfiguration of stories and ideas. For them, “it’s a liberating moment to open a book, written by an individual mind, and connect it with another, constructed by someone else”. With their speculative practice, Cramer and Epaminonda not only challenge received ideas of how to record and categorise knowledge, but also of how to engage with – and put one’s own spin on – that knowledge.  

The Infinite Library is an ongoing project by Berlin based artists Daniel Gustav Cramer (1975, DE) and Haris Epaminonda (1980, CY) that was initiated in 2007. It is primarily an expanding archive of books, created by dismantling existing books, modifying them and bounding them anew.

To date, the project includes 101 books and has been shown independently amongst others at Fabra i Coats, Barcelona (2020); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville (2016); Vila du Parc, Centre d´art contemporain, Annemasse (2015); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2012); Kunsthaus Glarus (2012) as well as in group exhibitions amongst others at Misk Art Institute, Riyadh (2022); KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2021); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2013); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2012) and The Jewish Museum, New York (2017).