Eli Cortiñas. The Machine Dreams of Smoke

‘The Machine Dreams of Smoke’ arises from the Museo Reina Sofía’s invitation to Eli Cortiñas to revisit ‘The Most Given of Givens’, a video-graphic work recently acquired for the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. The exhibition runs from 23 September 2026 to 8 March 2027 at the Sabatini Building’s Espacio 1.

The exhibition returns to, expands upon and updates research started by Cortiñas more than a decade ago, addressing the relationships between the history of cinema, the history of museums and recent digital culture. The project approaches those relationships from a perspective that reveals the complex colonial apparatus moulding the gaze and the construction of imagery and knowledge.

‘The Most Given of Givens’ is a three-channel video installation made in 2016. In the work, Cortiñas focuses on film as a machine that, across the twentieth century, centralised image production and consequently determined the bodies to be represented, as well as the memories and narratives to be legitimised, configuring a specific regime of visuality.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museo Reina Sofía organises a conversation between artist Eli Cortiñas, born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1979, and Amanda de la Garza, the Museo’s deputy artistic director.

‘On Images and Disobedience. Carte Blanche Session: Eli Cortiñas’ is an audiovisual series curated by Cortiñas in dialogue with her installation ‘The Machine Dreams of Smoke’, on view in the Museo Reina Sofía; the programme brings together political critique, post-internet delirium, protest film and contemporary theory.