Beatriz Cortez, Black Mirror. Multimedia installation: steel, automotive paint, found audio recording. Cerritos College Art Galleries. | Photo: James MacDevitt.
In artist Beatriz Cortezs installations, cracks and crevices are a consistent clue to the fractured existence she has experienced in her life. Cortezs work is greatly impacted by her migration from El Salvador to the United States and the civil war she endured, escaped, and left behind. All of my friends were being murdered. There was no way I could stay, Cortez tells me as we walk through her Los Angeles area studio, which contains many versions of her flight-into-exile narrative. Her installation work Hideout, revisits the stinging memory of hiding in a small crawlspace to avoid the whirring bullets flying past her. She re-fashions the ramshackle structure, inviting spectators to crawl inside and imagine the gestures of war rage in this now ambivalent space positioned in a gallery. Through cracks in the wall, observers can see the world through a sliver. The interrupted view is much like her own life.
She came to the U.S. in 1989, after the final offensive in San Salvador, a guerrilla intervention, led by the various factions united as the Frente Farabundo Mart para la Liberaci n Nacional, which disrupted the country's presidential elections, signaling the bloody end of the country's 12-year civil war.
Later, she earned her PhD in Latin American literature from Arizona State University. After a stint teaching Central American literature in Detroit, she came to Los Angeles, becoming a professor of Central American studies at California State University, Northridge.
As an immigrant artist, Cortez says that living in Arizona taught her about how difficult it is for immigrants to negotiate daily life in an environment often hostile to outsiders. The community of students [at Mesa Community College in Arizona] really helped me survive the shock of immigration in a most creative environment, Cortez said. It was there where she was simultaneously having trouble appreciating the beauty of the desert and missing the green of the tropics. I remember drawing the moving shadows of multiple moons made by the light of a solar eclipse moving through the branches of a tree, or us trying to paint that very landscape that immigrants find when crossing the border.
Beatriz Cortez, Hideout/Guarida. An exploration of space and the human condition throughout the experiences of war and immigration.
--
--
Cortez offers that her experience as a cultural critic impacts her work through an abounding relationship to theory that serves as a creative motor. Many of the ideas about the cosmos, the future, becoming, play, the posthuman, or the mechanic eye come from my inner conversations with Spinoza, Deleuze, Agamben, Braidotti, Cortez says. It is really interesting to find the connection between my life as an immigrant and my past as a person who grew up in a war, and my ideas about the future, all connected to the philosophy that I read.
There is an expansiveness of grief and mourning embedded in Cortez's installations. In the middle of the loss there is always some life and some joy that pops up in my work, she says. I'm always thinking about the future, death and the cosmos, play and virtual reality, as well as the past being still here in the present, or the coexistence of different temporalities.
Her piece The Time Machine, ruminates on the expansiveness of longing that exists in the rearview mirror of the immigrant's memory. This piece recreates a birds-eye view of San Salvador at night, lights dotting the purview while the viewer swings on the swing inside the large box-like structure -- the last site the Salvadoran immigrant sees while leaving home under duress. On the other side of the installation the dots splinter over a projection of Griffith Park overlooking Hollywood -- home to a large Central American community. A community that, in Cortez's rendering, continues to seek out a present interrupted by that constant longing that hiccups itself into relief.
Beatriz Cortez, The Time Machine/ La m quina del tiempo. Multimedia installation. 6 x 8 x 8 feet.
After so many years of not feeling displaced, Cortez says Los Angeles has finally become home, while she simultaneously thinks of El Salvador as her home. I think the technological possibilities, the friendships, the ways in which we are in two places at once has greatly impacted my work, Cortez says.
Simultaneity, the sense of being in two places or two different moments in time at once, is another theme that emerges consistently in her work. In her turn towards it, Cortez makes the past visible and alive by establishing connections to daily life around her.
In her archival work, she is currently exploring the history and politics of vocational school. Black Mirror, her latest large-scale installation that looks like a futuristic multi-sided hedron structure, is part of Your Life's Work, a series that she says explores the way vocational education was conceived as part of a plan for population control that put into practice ideas about the predetermination of people's lives that were inherited from colonial times and then recycled into modern national discourse. This series takes a cue from Cortez's background as an educator at one of Los Angeles' largest working class universities, where the role of education still seems to gesture towards the predetermination of different groups of people based on divisions of class and race.
Beatriz Cortez, Black Mirror. Multimedia installation: steel, automotive paint, found audio recording. Cerritos College Art Galleries.
Beatriz Cortez, Unknown/Desconocida. Wire, soil, paste, grass seeds.
Beatriz Cortez, The Fortune Teller Machine/La m quina de la fortuna. I
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Beatriz Cortez, Black Mirror. Multimedia installation: steel, automotive paint, found audio recording. Cerritos College Art Galleries. | Photo: James MacDevitt. 
