Image: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
‘On Images and Disobedience. Carte Blanche Session: Eli Cortiñas’ is an audiovisual series curated by artist Eli Cortiñas in dialogue with her installation ‘The Machine Dreams of Smoke’, which is on view in the Museo Reina Sofía. The series runs from 24 September to 3 October 2026.
Across three sessions, the programme brings together political critique, post-internet practices, protest film and contemporary theory. It links films and video works concerned with imagery, contested archives, technological systems and memories embodied in bodies, non-human beings and the land.
Its premise is that the image does not emerge as a neutral surface upon which the world appears, but as a disputed territory where categories of the human are made: some lives are illuminated, while others remain in darkness.
The programme features works by Musquiqui Chihying, Josèfa Ntjam, Haig Aivazian, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, Med Hondo and Eli Cortiñas. It is organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and presented within the framework of Cortiñas’s exhibition ‘The Machine Dreams of Smoke’.
Admission to the screenings is free until capacity is reached. Cortiñas’s wider exhibition practice questions the apparent transparency of images, technology and museum apparatus, asking viewers to consider not only what these visual and cognitive systems show, but also the power relations that sustain them and the contexts, bodies, memories and historical experiences that produce and cross through them.
