Carina Brandes (b. 1982, Brunswick) lives and works in Leipzig. Combining photography, performance, and collage, she constructs cinematic narratives in which her own body serves as an artistic instrument. Using a self-timer to document her staged actions, Brandes tests the body’s material and symbolic limits while reappropriating the objectifying gaze that falls upon the skin. In the most recent works, however, her own skin slips slightly out of focus. Through collage-like interventions, Brandes turns to the photographic surface itself, cutting it apart and reassembling it into new configurations. The artist’s body thus resurfaces in the fault lines between these fragments. In her upcoming exhibition at BQ, Brandes focuses on singular yet recurring moments when something is emitted in the face of the Other, rendering the familiar suddenly strange. Through photographic sequences that pair the Real with the surreal, she draws the viewer into a dreamlike state whose immediacy is nonetheless arresting. The dream returns, as does the ghost, reinscribing the Real within her images.