Carina BrandesMother’s Tongue

Abject/Object/Subject: At the centre of the photographic work of Carina Brandes (*1982), which she showed in 2018 at the Kunstverein Heilbronn, is her own body, which she deploys – in an almost cool manner, according to a reading current today – as the material of her artistic production. In the process there arise quasi-surreal confrontations between her body and the most diverse worlds of objects, through which the seemingly everyday settings turn into mysterious occurrences full of latent desires. In the context of current gender and body politics, the female body commonly stands for horror and sex, is associated with maltreated victims or degraded into a titillating advertising device. Carina Brandes counters this with its ambiguous appearance in a deliberately man-free world that can be determined as much by an abject objecthood as by sensual and humorous moments. The artist, a former competitive gymnast familiar since her earliest youth with her body as a medium of self-shaping, mostly works alone and uses analogue photographic technique throughout. Her playful and dynamic approach takes the interplay of sensation and external stimulus, of subject and object, beyond the feminist questions formulated by positions already to be classed as classic, such as those of Ana Mendieta, Maria Lassnig, Valie Export or Cindy Sherman. As a Villa Romana prize-winner in 2017 she developed new works in Florence, which have found their way into the comprehensive survey of her work compiled for the first time in this publication.

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