Ana María Caballero - Echo Graph
Ana María Caballero
Echo Graph
20.02. – 04.04. 2025
Openning, 20.02., 6–9 pm
Echo Graph, is the first solo exhibition by Ana Maria Caballero with the gallery and also her first solo show in Germany.
Ana María Caballero is a multiple award-winning, transdisciplinary artist. Her work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil from romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She’s the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beverly International Literature Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Art Writers Award and a Sevens Foundation Grant.
She’s the first living poet to sell a poem in the history of Sotheby’s, and the only artist ever to receive a triple finalist nomination for the Lumen Prize
In the exhibition Ana María Caballero, presents a single poem in multiple ways, exploring how the medium through which verse is experienced affects the meaning it conveys. The exhibition presents itself as a multi-tentacled organism, with limbs that complement but can live independently of one another.
Echo Graph brings together Caballero’s acclaimed performative, sculptural, conceptual and written work–crossing over from digital into analog realms with such ease that the boundary between these becomes blurred to the point of irrelevance. The pieces in this exhibition challenge notions of materiality and immersion, asking us to bear witness to the ways language takes hold within and without our bodies.
At the root of the exhibition is a single poem, Echo Graph, from Caballero’s prize-winning book MAMMAL, which narrates the moment the artist is informed by a doctor that her placenta has stopped working and that her first-born son must be taken out immediately. Following a grim series of events, Caballero ends up on a glacial operating table, where she has an emergency C-section after her child’s heart-rate drops during induced contractions of birth. The doctors then realize that her placenta is fine.
Taking place twelve years later, this exhibition vindicates trauma through its transformation in art. The original poem is not driven by anger but by a desire to document. In “publishing” one poetic text in manifold ways, Caballero becomes an artist, body, writer who has taken control.
