DokfestForum takes place in cooperation with the Fridericianum and directs its focus on the intersection of film, documentary, and visual art. Over two consecutive evenings, a selection of videos by Klara Hobza and Eli Cortiñas will be presented.

Introduction: Curatorial team, Fridericianum

Screening:
Walls Have Feelings, 2019
(single channel video, length: 14 min., English)
Quella Che Cammina, 2014
(single channel video, length: 10 min., English)
Not Gone with the Wind, 2020
(single channel video, length: 9 min., English)
The Machine Monologues, 2024
(multichannel video (single channel length: 10 min.), English)

Subsequently: Talk with the artist (in English)

Eli Cortiñas’ practice centers around the idea of challenging our audiovisual cultural memory by analyzing existing material and combining it with her own film, video, and audio archives. By first collecting, organizing, and classifying the sourced material, the artist then reworks and reimagines the found film, YouTube, advertising, or animation footage in a next step, disrupting and re-structuring narrative flows. Cortiñas’ video montages, collages, and object arrangements suggest new and different meanings to appropriated and edited footage in order to debunk myths and hegemonic narratives, as the Canary Islands native artist states. This method of ‘editing as writing’ generates a mixed feeling of both identification and alienation. A deep dive into psychological, aesthetic, and societal questions, Eli Cortiñas manages to create an ambiguous and affirmative transparency within her work, inviting her audience to explore power, memory, and politics.

Eli Cortiñas is a video artist born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. She worked as a guest professor at the Academy of Art in Kassel and Mainz and has shared the professorship Spatial Concepts with Candice Breitz at the University of Art Braunschweig. Since 2022 she has been appointed tenure professor of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. Cortiñas has received numerous grants and residencies, and her work is part of public collections such as the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, the Berlin Senate collection, the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, among others. The work of Eli Cortiñas has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in institutions such as the Museum Ludwig, Kunsthalle Budapest, CAC Vilnius, SCHIRN Kunsthalle, SAVVY Contemporary, as well as in biennials and international festivals such as the Ural Industrial Biennial, the Riga Biennial, the Kassel Dokfest et al. Eli Cortiñas lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig.