Kiki Karnstein is the artistic alter ego of Berlin-based art historian, curator and visual artist Dr Kirstin Buchinger.

Working between photography, archives and AI-assisted image-making, her work explores memory, mythology and archetypal imagery. Combining references to art history and the history of photography with contemporary post-photographic processes, she investigates the visual unconscious of digital culture.

Originally trained through analogue black-and-white photography and darkroom work, her artistic practice has evolved from classical photography towards conceptual and AI-assisted image-making. At its centre lies the conditio humana and the persistence of images across time and media.

She is founder and director of the registered YVA Archive Berlin®, an independent initiative dedicated to the preservation, research and mediation of photographic heritage. She is a member of the German Photographic Society (DGPh) and has been invited to teach Photography after Photography at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences, Berlin, in the winter semester 2026/27.

Recent exhibitions include EX MACHINA (2025), Natura Naturans (2025) and Escape Velocity (2026).

„An expressive brushstroke does not make a work authentic. Its absence does not make it inauthentic.“

— Kiki Karnstein