Fritha Langerman's work concerns knowledge.
Langerman's series of armor works examines knowledge in the context of education systems. She suggests that knowledge can both arm us and shield us from the truth. She titles several works with clichés, which undermine truth by simplifying it. To create the armor series, Langerman ripped apart syllabus texts and school notebooks, assembled them over wire armatures in the shapes of pieces of armor, and then stained and waxed them. She reconfigures the fragments of text, once stitched together in bound books but now rendered redundant and supplementary, by stitching, quilting, and weaving them together again.

The stitch is a suture - the opposite of a cut, it closes wounds. Formerly associated with submission and domesticity, the stitch been democratized and empowered - as South Africa's new generations must be by post-Apartheid syllabuses. Langerman's deconstructed and reconstructed texts imply knowledge's relationship to power, and point to the need for new readings. In recent work, Langerman focuses on how bodies of knowledge are structured and how they impact the human body. The works often have several modular units, each different, which can be ordered in various ways. As with Internet information, meaning is generated through non-directional flows and multiple, organic connectivity. This type of knowledge is non-taxonomic. Each component unit is also layered and multiple. Screenprinting, xerography, mixed media, and found materials are assembled behind Plexiglass, suggestive of museum specimens. Each unit becomes a multivalent sign that exists within a semiotic system by virtue of its juxtaposition with other signs. The two works "Objects For: a trans-cultural lexicon" and "Basic Equations" reflect these concerns.