Image: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid ; Eli Cortiñas, VEGAP, Madrid
Coinciding with the opening of ‘The Machine Dreams of Smoke’, Eli Cortiñas will engage in conversation with Amanda de la Garza, the Museo Reina Sofía’s deputy artistic director, on 22 September 2026.
The conversation is scheduled for 7pm in the Cinema of the Sabatini Building.
The discussion will explore the exhibition’s conceptual and creative focal points, Cortiñas’s research process, colonial imagery, archives, museum technologies and the role of AI in the production and circulation of images.
It takes as its point of departure the recent incorporation into the Museo Reina Sofía Collections of ‘The Most Given of Givens’ (2016), which Cortiñas revisits and expands upon in the exhibition. ‘The Most Given of Givens’ is a three-channel video installation dated 2016.
The exhibition continues research Cortiñas undertook more than a decade ago on the relationships between the history of film, the history of museums and contemporary technologies of image production.
Cortiñas’s exhibition presents historical narratives as shaped by selection and interpretation, producing omissions and dominant accounts that have helped consolidate the power of certain social groups; it also suggests that algorithms and other technological tools carry symbolic functions in the configuration of new systems of knowledge. It invites viewers to question images, technology and museum apparatus not only for what they show, but also for the power relations, contexts, bodies, memories and historical experiences that produce and cross through them.
