Ana Maria Caballero - Ana Maria Caballero

Ana María Caballero is a multiple award-winning, transdisciplinary artist. Her work explores the tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to explain (and thus attempt to contain) them.

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, the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, a Future Art Writers Award, a Sevens Foundation Grant, among other recognitions.

She’s the first living poet to sell a poem in the history of Sotheby’s and the first artist ever to receive a triple finalist nomination for the Lumen Prize. Her work is often featured by publications like artnet, Observer, Monopol, Poetry International, ArtNews, BOMB, Poets.org, and El País. Her work is in the collection of some of the world’s top institutions, such as the Reina Sofía, the MACBA, the Ashmolean, HEK Basel, the Francisco Carolinum, Spalter Digital, the Stahlberg Collection, and has been presented at leading venues including Art Basel, the Venice Biennale Vernissage, the V&A, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, Fundación March and ICA Miami.

A graduate of Harvard and the author of eight books, she also co-founded the digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse.

Pace

In her most recent micro poetic film, Ana María Caballero pays homage to Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All and proposes an evolution in personal empowerment. Whereas Rist’s protagonist symbolically takes down failed systems, Caballero’s main character practices radical repair.

Pace posits that private joy is as powerful a form of resistance as destruction.

Ropa sucia (The Wash)

Ropa sucia (The Wash) is a limited edition artist book by Ana María Caballero, released in partnership with S/W Ediciones. Each version of Ropa sucia contains a unique set of twelve poems and materials with which to hang them. All the poems are from Caballero’s newest manuscript, /Cortadas.

Echo Graph

Echo Graph, a solo exhibition by Ana María Caballero at Office Impart in Berlin, presents a single poem in multiple ways, exploring how the medium through which verse is experienced affects the meaning it conveys.

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.

Literal Litoral

Combining performance, spoken-word poetry, choreography, photography, and blockchain provenance, Caballero’s Literal Litoral series transcends the page, pushing the boundary of how poetry can be exhibited, experienced and transacted in the digital age.

These performative works honor Caballero’s strong spoken-word history and poetry’s tradition of orality. In these multifaceted renditions of self, she speaks her poem via movement, exploring how body language ties into spoken language.

Caballero’s work probes how the inescapable rhythms of our bodies govern our emotional hungers.

Book Sculptures

Caballero’s Book Sculptures are an eight-part series that questions how society values poetry. This series proposes the book as a sculptural object, and will see Caballero print eight different books, each as an edition of one, with a unique ISBN and the anatomy and structure of a traditional book.

The books in this series contain only one poem, printed 197 times in their pages. When taken as integers, the digits in 197 add up eventually to 8, a number that represents abundance.

Being Borges

Being Borges is a poetic and (post)photographic recasting of Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings. Presented in partnership with Berlin gallery Office Impart and London-based Verse Works, this twelve-part series begs the question: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?

Paperwork

Paperwork, released in partnership with Bright Moments, is a performance-based, generative AI collection of digital paper sculptures carved from individual emotional responses to the spoken-word poetry of Ana María Caballero. Throughout 2023, Caballero performed her poems in numerous venues across the world, inviting audience members to write down one word in response to her verse on sheets of paper.

She gathered these slips of paper—these distilled, private moments of connection to her readings—and used each word to actuate Paperwork’s compositions, honoring paper’s haptic eloquence and materializing lived experiences via the digital form.

In 2024, Caballero introduced an expansion of the series, announcing the creation of six physical sculptures, each rooted in an artist-owned digital edition.

The making of Paperwork, Video presented at the V&A Museum during their Digital Design Week, 2024

Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem

In this collaborative artwork, Ana María Caballero invited fifty different people to read and annotate the same poem, performing their experience of its verse via hand-written marginalia.

Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem celebrates the ways in which writers and readers construct each other. Readers give literature life within their minds, honoring words when they make them their own by leaving a mark.

The combined, iterative interventions in this series represent the collective evolution of readership.

Language is universal—yet personal—and every reading pulls and pushes it forth.

artifacts

Ana María Caballero and Alex Estorick launched artifacts, a long-form generative AI project, in 2023. This collection imagines a new token economy where both image and coinage can challenge tired histories. In 2024, they created a site-specific iteration of the project for Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which became the museum’s first digital art acquisition.

Things I Am Saving to Write

As a poet, Caballero uses words to generate images within people’s minds. For Things I Am Saving to Write, she used the imagery of her verse as the foundation of AI prompting, crafting a visual narrative that brings our collective unconscious into direct dialogue with language’s unspoken connotations, calling forth the entanglements of meaning-making.

Things I Am Saving to Write was presented at the Code Chronicles exhibition at bitforms gallery in 2023, curated by Aleksandra Artamonovskaj.

During the length of the exhibition, visitors contributed things they were saving to write, giving birth to the collaborative poem Things We Are Saving to Write

Things I Am Saving to Write

Things We Are Saving to Write

Ways To Misspell Obsidian

Ways To Misspell Obsidian is a collection of spoken-word poems by Ana María Caballero that investigates and celebrates the storytelling potential of long-form poetry. Following the passing of a very close friend, Caballero composed Juan, a eulogy-in-verse. This text serves as both precursor and companion to “Ways to Misspell Obsidian,” a lyric essay written years later in which details of Juan’s passing are braided into the story of the intoxication of Caballero’s young son with nail polish remover.