Ana María Caballero
Oración, 2023
HD video with audio
TRT: 1 minutes 38 seconds

In Oración (Prayer), which takes its name from a poem by acclaimed Colombian poet María Mercedes Carranza, Ana María Caballero proposes a new form of literary translation, breaking down the process to probe the subliminal connotations of prayer, the poetics of prompts and the semiotic entanglements of metaphor.

Caballero’s textual translation is gestural–a personalized recasting of Carranza’s desperation in ways that speak to Caballero’s own relationship with devotion. By concentrating on the poem’s undercurrent of despair, Caballero accentuates poetry’s ability to capture ephemeral, personal moments and preserve them within poetic time and space so they may be felt by others. Caballeroalso transposed phrases from the poem, along with nuanced interpretations of its symbolism, into prompts, creating a vast compendium of images. The semantics, sounds, palettes, architectures, garments, kinesics, iconographies of prayer have been conditioned by institutionalized faith over centuries. Despite this, Caballero found honesty in her dialogue with the machine, curating a visual narrative that evokes the privacy, hope and despair of prayer, at once an experience of intense selfhood and acknowledgement of otherness. As prayer uses language to beseech the unknown for answers, working with text-to-image generation queries our collective unconscious, scouring our digital, shared memories, hoping to find an image that looks and feels like a response.

Few are the places where the personal and the universal, the sublime and the crepuscular, the known and the unknown, collide as bluntly as in prayer—but, also, as in poetry.

Ana María Caballero is a Colombian-American poet and artist. Her verse explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She’s the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and a Sevens Foundation Grant. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been widely published and exhibited internationally,most recently at Gazelli Art House, L’Avant Galerie Vossen and Galloire in Dubai. As cofounder of digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse, she’s pushing the boundaries of how poetry is exhibited, experienced and valued.

EPOCH presents, XENOSPACE, a ground-breaking and experimental virtual exhibition that features seven artists exploring the collaborative boundaries between AI and machine learning within their creative processes.

The title “XENOSPACE” alludes to an unusual or unfamiliar environment. EPOCH has processed 360 equirectangular panoramas through Stable Diffusion, generating the subsequent AI-assisted environments that serve as the backdrop for the artworks.

XENOSPACE responds to a significant moment in the field, as it reflects on the growing relationship between humans and machines and the impact of AI on creative expression. The exhibition serves as a benchmark, showcasing the expansive collaborative potential of AI and machine learning in contemporary art practices and exhibition building. – chatGPT