Read the Room by Ana María Caballero at Francisco Carolinum Linz

With Read the Room , the Francisco Carolinum presents 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, performance, sculpture, choreography, cinematic AI, and literature. Together, they offer insight into an artistic practice based on a fundamental conviction: language is not a fixed medium, but a living process that unfolds in 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 and reveals how meaning emerges, changes, and multiplies in the 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 tangible as a 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, her work is represented in the collections of the Reina Sofía, MACBA Barcelona, ​​Fundación March, and Ashmolean Museum, among others; her work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale and Art Basel.

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

Curated by Julia Staudach

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