Eli Cortiñas • The Machine Dreams of Smoke • 23.09.2026–08.03.2027
The Machine Dreams of Smoke arises from the Museo Reina Sofía’s invitation to Eli Cortiñas (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1979) to revisit The Most Given of Givens, a video-graphic work the artist made in 2016, and a piece recently acquired for the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. The exhibition returns to, expands upon and updates research started by Cortiñas more than a decade ago, in a work which addresses the relationships between the history of cinema, the history of museums and recent digital culture from a perspective that reveals the complex colonial apparatus that moulds the gaze and the construction of imagery and knowledge.
In The Most Given of Givens, Cortiñas focuses on film, a machine which, across the twentieth century, centralised image production and, as a result, determined the bodies to be represented and the memories and narratives to be legitimised, configuring a specific regime of visuality. Through meticulous archive work on found footage, the artist analyses the film images of Tarzan, unearthing how Hollywood adventure films made use of ethnographic film to produce popular imagery of African peoples as an “other” translated through a colonial gaze and logic. In the films on this man of English origin raised in the jungle, the ethnographic images filmed in Africa to capture the ways of life of its inhabitants served as a backdrop—using the rear-projection technique—against which the actors were filmed in close-up.
The expressive capacity of this film collage stems from the clash and association of images. Along with numerous found fragments, the artist projects present-day images of a Greek acropolis under construction—a metaphor for a hegemonic European culture in ruins that has historically silenced the presence of any foreign ancestral culture—casting light on those operating to produce subjectivity opposite an objectified other.
She uses the hall of Espacio 1 to amplify these ideas spatially and sculpturally, alluding to the museum apparatus and new technological devices used to produce and disseminate images as the machinery underpinning the knowledge construction of our contemporaneity. With the aid of artificial intelligence and drawing on archives of images licensed for commercial purposes, the artist creates a scenography which seeks false neutrality. In a colourful pastel palette, in reference to the chroma-key backgrounds used to produce digital scenes, display cases appear, emptied of the objects plundered during the colonial period—still part of many European collections, awaiting a restitution that has yet to take place. The museum, a Western invention with decades-long participation in the desacralisation of usurped objects, is inhabited here by new amulets and hands that touch, classify, study or guard, owing to the prosthesis of current sacred artefacts.
Part of contemporary historiography presumes that history is not neutral, that all historical narratives involve a selection, an interpretation that gives rise to omissions and dominant historical narratives that have helped to consolidate the power of certain social groups. Cortiñas suggests, moreover, that algorithms are not neutral: each new technological tool at our disposal is a device loaded with a symbolic function that participates in the configuration of new epistemological regimes.
Ultimately, Eli Cortiñas invites us to be wary of the apparent transparency of images, technology and museum apparatus, asking us to question these visual and cognitive systems not only for what they show, but also for the power relations that sustain them, and for the contexts, bodies, memories and historical experiences that produce and cross through them.
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