Eli Cortiñas. The Machine Dreams of Smoke

The Sabatini Building (Space 1) at the Reina Sofía Museum will host an exhibition from 23 September to 8 March 2027 in which the artist from the Canary Islands, Eli Cortiñas, will revisit her video-graphic work, The Most Given of Givens, produced in 2016 and recently acquired for the Museum’s Collections. In this reinterpretation, the artist invites visitors to mistrust the apparent transparency of images, technology and the museum apparatus.

Eli Cortiñas (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1979) embarked on research more than a decade ago to address the relationships between the history of film, museums and the recent digital culture from a perspective that reveals the complex colonial apparatus that shapes the gaze and the construction of imagery and knowledge.     

In The Most Given of Givens, Cortiñas focuses on film, the machine that centralised image production throughout the 20th century and, as a result, determined the bodies to be represented and which memories and narratives are legitimate, leading to a specific regime of visuality. 

The artist uses the hall of Space 1 to amplify her ideas spatially and sculpturally, alluding to the museum apparatus and new technological devices used to produce and disseminate images as the machinery that underpins knowledge construction today. With the help of artificial intelligence and drawing on archives of images licensed for commercial purposes, the artist creates a stage that seeks false neutrality. 

In short, Eli Cortiñas questions these visual and cognitive systems, not only for what they show, but also for the power relations that sustain them, as well as the contexts, bodies, memories and historical experiences that produce and cross them. 

Image Credit:

• Eli Cortiñas, The Most Given of Givens, 2016, three-channel video installation. Reina Sofía Museum © Eli Cortiñas, VEGAP, Madrid, 2026