Ana María Caballero: Read the Room

The Francisco Carolinum Linz presents Read the Room, the first institutional mid-career retrospective of the artist and poet Ana María Caballero. The exhibition brings together key works from the fields of installation art, performance art, sculpture, choreography, cinematic art and literature. Together, these works offer insight into Caballero's artistic practice, which is based on the fundamental belief that language is not a fixed medium, but a living process that unfolds through the interplay of writing and reading.

The exhibition's starting point is Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem. For this project, Caballero invited 50 people to read and annotate the same poem. Each edition documents an individual reading process, revealing how meaning emerges, changes and multiplies through engagement with a text. The work illustrates what Caballero describes as 'analog generativity': the reciprocal production of meaning by readers and writers.

From there, the exhibition unfolds a multifaceted panorama of selected works that extend the poem beyond the page. In digital, process-oriented and spatial formats, language becomes a tangible visual, performative and technological medium.

As a first-generation Colombian-American artist, Caballero works at the intersection of literature and visual art. She is the author of eight books and her work is represented in the collections of the Reina Sofía, MACBA Barcelona, Fundación March and the Ashmolean Museum, among others. Her work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale and Art Basel.

Read the Room offers a comprehensive view of the interconnections between the analogue and the digital, physicality and algorithms, and the individual poem and its countless interpretations for the first time. It reveals work that does not separate these apparent opposites, but rather makes their mutual interdependence tangible.

curator: Julia Staudach

Francisco Carolinum Linz
Museumstraße 14
Linz / Austria