Eli Cortiñas

Eli Cortiñas, 1979, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Eli Cortiñas is an artist born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. She has been living in Germany since 1995 and in Berlin since 2013, after studying media art at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne. Cortiñas works with and against archives, seeking to recover invisibilized and silenced voices through a situated, intersectional, and feminist practice that rethinks, re-edits, and reconfigures audiovisual material to create speculative narratives that reveal and repair these gaps. Her research-based practice aims to shape a language for the challenging task of telling the unsaid, the distorted, the omitted or the intentionally forgotten, as a practice of intergenerational feminist engagement.

Cortiñas has received numerous grants and residencies, including the grant of the Botín Foundation, the Kunstfonds grant, the prestigious Villa Massimo prize in Rome, the Berlin Senate Scholarship, the Villa Sträuli Residency in Switzerland, the Goethe-Institut residency in Turin, the residency at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Rupert residency in Vilnius, and the renowned Karl Schmidt-Rottluff grant.

Her work is part of public collections such as the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, the Berlin Senate collection, the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, the Museum Kunst Palast Düsseldorf, the Kunstmuseum Bonn or the YAKS Foundation, 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, S.M.A.K., Kunstverein Braunschweig, Museum Marta Herford, BOZAR Brussels, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art Moscow, Kunstmuseum Bonn and MUSAC et al., as well as in biennials and international festivals such as the Ural Industrial Biennial, the Riga Biennial, the Moscow International Biennial of Young Art, the Mardin Biennial, the Oberhausen International Festival, the Vila do Conde International Festival, the Filmoteca Española and the Nashville Film Festival et al.

Cortiñas has been working as an educator since 2011 as part of her practice of intergenerational educational engagement, including professorships at the Kunsthochschule Kassel (2015–2017), Kunsthochschule Mainz (2015), the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (2019–2022) and the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts (2019/2020). Since 2022, she is an appointed tenured Professor of Media Art at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.