Carina Brandes: Hauntings

Carina Brandes (*1982, Brunswick) lives and works in Leipzig. In her work, she brings together photography, performance and collage into cinematic narratives. Using her own body as an artistic instrument, Brandes documents actions with a self-timer, which test the body’s limits both materially and symbolically in order to perform a reappropriation of the objectifying gaze that lies on the skin. In her most recent work, however, her own skin slips slightly out of focus. In collage-like interventions, Brandes turns to the photographic surface, cuts it up, and reassembles it into new configurations. The artist’s body remains present within the fault lines emerging from in between these fragments.

In her upcoming exhibition at BQ, Brandes focuses on the singular yet repetitive instances when something is emitted in the face of the Other, which renders strange what we know best. In photographic sequences that pair the real with the surreal, Brandes draws the viewer into a dreamlike state, arresting them in its immediacy. The dream returns, as does the ghost, to reinscribe the Real in her images.