Carina Brandes: Mother’s Tongue

Abject/object/subject

At the centre of Carina Brandes' (*1982) photographic work - which she showed at the Kunstverein Heilbronn in 2018 - is her own body, which she uses - in an almost cool manner, according to a common interpretation today - as the material of her artistic production. This results in surreal confrontations between her body and a wide variety of object worlds, as it were, whereby the seemingly everyday settings are transformed into mysterious occurrences full of latent desires. In the context of current gender and body politics, the female body generally stands for horror and sex, is associated with maltreated victims or degraded to a provocative advertising medium. Carina Brandes contrasts this with its ambiguous appearance in a deliberately male-free world, which can be characterised by an abject objectivity as well as by sensual and humorous moments. The artist, a former gymnast who has been familiar with her body as a medium of self-portraiture since her earliest youth, usually works alone and uses analogue photography throughout. Her playful and dynamic approach takes the interplay of sensation and external stimulus, of subject and object, beyond the feminist issues formulated by the classic positions of Ana Mendieta, Maria Lassnig, Valie Export and Cindy Sherman. As a Villa Romana prizewinner in 2017, she developed new works in Florence, which have been incorporated into the comprehensive overview of her work compiled for the first time in this publication.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 22/9 - 25/11/2019