If It Walks Like A Duck...

If it Walks Like a Duck… marks Eli Cortiñas’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery, unfolding around the video installation Surrender, Dorothy! (2025), originally conceived for the exhibition Global Fascisms at HKW in Berlin, where the artist is based. Positioned at the heart of the exhibition space, the video installation is flanked by aluminum sculptures mounted on poles representing a braided hair from the back. A series of digital prints, mounted on a wallpaper, completes the installation.

Cortiñas’s Dorothy was digitally crafted after Judy Garland’s portrayal of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939), a cinema performance structured by deep contradictions. Garland, a young adult cast as a child, was styled to project innocence while being meticulously engineered for the male gaze. Much like a proto–TikTok filter, her chest was flattened with bandages and a tight corset to suppress signs of maturity, even as her lips were painted red and her appearance subtly yet insistently feminized. For her first work developed with artificial intelligence, Cortiñas scrambled archival, found, and stock footage through AI-driven processes, intertwining them with generative material and clips produced using Snapchat filters. She approached various generative tools as both adversaries to be confronted and a collaborators to negotiate with.

In the video Surrender, Dorothy! (2025), we are guided by a head-and-shoulders shot of a monochromatic CGI girl whose hyper-realistic facial features contrast with a surface that resembles sculpted stone. Addressing the viewer directly, she offers a red thread that leads us into the work, echoing the familiar, reassuring guide she once embodied in The Wizard of Oz. Here, however, her role shifts into that of a lecturer, unfolding a sustained address on the violent legacy of imperialism: from the erosion of empathy, to the instrumentalization and abuse of the female body, to contemporary warfare under conditions of technological alienation, and the misuse of artificial intelligence.

Each mini-chapter is punctuated by the appearance of a braided head seen from the back, which evokes the illustrations of nineteenth-century children’s books and are also reproduced in large-scale Dibond prints throughout the exhibition. In the video, the braids knock against one another, producing a sound that recalls the infamous line “There’s no place like home,” uttered as Dorothy clicks her heels together to magically return. At some point, like a glitch, the braids transform into a keffiyeh, a brief yet charged apparition that suggests how resistance emerges from fractures and interruptions. This gesture also reflects the artist’s biographical situation: based in Germany, Cortiñas operates within a cultural context in which artists have repeatedly faced silencing and professional repercussions for expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people.

At intervals, the artist herself appears in the video, rendered as a cartoon figure through a SnapChat filter. We catch brief glimpses of her in transit on a plane, performing seemingly trivial actions such as adjusting her glasses. These moments of apparent inactivity are anything but incidental. In an economy governed by attention and productivity, idleness arguably becomes a deliberate refusal. Each suspended second is a gesture against capitalist time, proposing inaction as one of the last remaining forms of resistance.

Another recurring figure appears throughout the video, referencing Jools Lebron (@joolieannie), a trans American of Puerto Rican descendance, known for her offbeat makeup tutorials. In August 2024, filming herself in her car, she described herselft as “very demure, very mindful", despite being heavily made up. Circulating as both self-parody and survival strategy, her performance exposed the contradictions embedded in femininity: the persistent demand placed on women to never be excessive, while remaining feminine and non-threatening. Positioned within Surrender, Dorothy!, this figure amplifies the ambivalence of Dorothy-Judy’s position as a victim gendered domination, yet as a pivotal catalyst of feminist rupture. Towards the end of the video, her monologue doesn’t end by offering hope but by demanding speech, invoking Audre Lorde’s The Transformation of Silence Into Language, a speech she delivered at the 1977 Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in Chicago, in which Lorde insists on the political urgency and necessity of speaking out.

Elise Lammer Curator and author