If It Walks Like A Duck... Eli Cortiñas
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.
