Ana María Caballero Echo Graph

20.02. – 04.04.2025
Opening: Thursday 20.02., 6 – 9 pm CET
at OFFICE IMPART; Waldenserstr. 2-4, 10551 Berlin

Introduction

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.

Text about the exhibition
by Doreen Ríos

List of Works

About Ana Maria Caballero

ANA MARÍA CABALLERO is a multidisciplinary, award-winning Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits our societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue.

The speakers in her poems find their voice by navigating the intellectual and the everyday, daring to name what’s left unsaid in that all-important space of home. Her poems are moments of private rebellion, made public.

Caballero’s first book of poetry, Entre domingo y domingo, received Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and was second place in the nationwide Ediciones Embajale Prize. Acclaimed international publishing house Valparaíso Press acquired its rights and re-released it in 2023.

She’s published two chapbooks in English. Reverse Commute (2015) was anthologized by Silver Birch Press, and Finishing Line Press published Mid-life (2016) as a standalone chapbook.

Her first nonfiction manuscript, A Petit Mal, was awarded the International Beverly Prize and was published in 2023. It was also a finalist for the Kurt Brown Prize, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Awards, the Essay Press Prize, the Electronic Book Awards, the Split/Lip Press reading cycle and longlisted for the 2022 Memoir Prize. Out of an entry pool of over 2300 applicants, it was named a finalist for the INDIES Forward Review Book of the Year Award.

Mammal, her most recent manuscript, was awarded the 2022 Steel Toe Books Award in Poetry and was published in 2024. It was also a semifinalist for the prestigious Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, designated as a Manuscript of Exceptional Merit by Tupelo Press and a finalist for both The Atticus Review and Driftwood Press reading cycles.

Tryst, a collection of three short stories published in 2022 with Web3 publishing house AlexandriaLabs as a limited edition of 100 NFTs, sold out in under forty-eight hours.

Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has appeared in journals such as the L.A. Review of Books, The Academy of American Poets Magazine, Portland Review, Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, Gigantic Sequins and The Southeast Review and reached the final round of consideration in Ploughshare’s Emerging Writers Contest.

She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she was awarded a scholarship by Madrid’s Complutense University to complete her honors thesis work. As a graduate student of Poetry at Florida International University, she was both the winner and runner-up of the Academy of American University Poetry Prize.

Widely recognized as one of the leading figures in digital poetry, she’s the first living poet to sell a poem via Sotheby’s and the first artist ever to be a triple Lumen Prize Finalist. Her work has also been recognized with a MAXXI Bvlgari Finalist Nomination, a Sevens Foundation grant and a Knight Foundation Art  + Tech Fellowship Nomination.

Recent venue exhibitions include the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, HEK Basel (virtual), the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Málaga, the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, Sotheby’s, Times Square and the New World Center in Miami.

Her work with poetry on the blockchain is often covered by major media outlets, such as The Art Newspaper, Artnet, NPR, Entrepreneur, Coindesk and Elle UK.

Caballero has been a speaker at events organized by Fundación Telefónica, Gray Area in San Francisco, DASL London, UNTITLED Art Fairs, the University of the Arts London, Sovereign Nature Institute, O, Miami Poetry Festival, among others.

She cofounded digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse.com, where the intrinsic value of poems as works of art is made manifest via blockchain technology.  theVERSEverse has been shortlisted for the Lumen Prize and the Digital Innovation in Art Award.

Caballero is a contributing writer for Forbes, covering Web3 culture.

https://anamariacaballero.com/

CV

Selected exhibitions:

Back to Echo Graph