Tania Franco Klein: Break in Case of Emergency

Tania Franco Klein: Break in Case of Emergency by Aline SmithsonMarch 19, 2023

1_Egg, fork, and flies (self-portrait) 2022

©Tania Franco Klein, Egg, fork, and flies (self-portrait) 2022

Mexican photographer Tania Franco Klein has recently opened the exhibition, BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, at ROSEGALLERY running until April 15, 2023. Klein’s newest work straddles the ambiguous realm of the strange, with works that are cinematic, surrealistic, and challenge the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Her golden color palette of sun bleached late afternoons, right as darkness envelopes the day, creates a contemporary sense of film noir. Her tableaux follow in the footsteps of David Lynch and Luis Buñuel, as she portrays the ridiculous as rational. These small novellas combine into “an empowering, fragmented investigation into psychological boundaries. What does it look like when someone approaches their mental precipice? And how should it feel? Less interested in specific answers, these witty, ambiguous, sometimes macabre works carry a sort of vertiginous logic that is solely hers.”

2_Rounded Mirror, Window (self-portrait) 2022

©Tania Franco Klein, Rounded Mirror, Window (self-portrait) 2022

©Tania Franco Klein, Fork, tub (self-portrait) 2021

Tania Franco Klein (b. 1990) started her photography praxis while gaining her BA Architecture in Mexico City, which took her to pursue her Master’s in Photography at the University of the Arts London. Her work is highly influenced by her fascination with social behavior and contemporary practices such as leisure,consumption, media overstimulation, and the psychological sequels they generate in our everyday life.

Franco Klein’s work has been reviewed by international critique including ARTFORUM, CNN, L.A Times, I-D Magazine, The Guardian, The Paris Review, JUXTAPOZ, Aperture Foundation, The British Journal of Photography, and has been commissioned by clients like The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker, FT weekend, New York Magazine, and Dior.

Her work has been exhibited across Europe, the USA, and Mexico. Including venues like the Somerset House London, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and Aperture Gallery in NYC. Her latest two solo shows which showcased a wide selection of her latest fours series were presented by ROSEGALLERY in 2019 and 2023.

She obtained The Lensculture Exposure Awards, Lensculture Storytelling Awards, The Felix Schoeller Photo Award of Germany Nominee, FOAM Paul Huf Award, and Prix Pictet nominee, and received the Photo London Artproof Schliemann Award as the best-emerging artist during Photo London fair 2018. Her first publication Positive Disintegration (2019) was nominated for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Book Award.ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, the latest project by Mexican photographer Tania Franco Klein.

Follow Tania Franco Klein on Instagram: @taniafrancoklein

Follow RoseGallery on Instagram: @_rosegallery_

4_Pan, fire, kitchen (self-portrait) 2022

©Tania Franco Klein, Pan, fire, kitchen (self-portrait) 2022

Break In Case of Emergency
(Flies, Forks, and Fires)

BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY came by way of Klein’s fascination with catharsis, a term hearkened by Aristotle, and an arguably vital component of a successful “poetic,” i.e. any human-produced representation of life that is outside the thing itself. In that spirit, these images are fabulously unreal, yet succeed in evoking the underlying emotions, the unnameable feelings brewing inside our contemporary psyche. Think, “relatably absurd.”

With BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, Klein invites us into her fastidious considerations, her willingness to search for the mysterious, for the enigmatic, even for the taboo, whatever she may discover that’s, maybe— akimbo to normative enjoyment. With her female subjects directed into off-kilter, apropos, and even cryptic circumstances, audiences ideally are thrust into a dyadic voyeurism; an Other’s fiction is so artfully rendered as to become an “undefined poetic,” projecting itself upon us, inhabiting our mind, twisting our emotions into as-yet-recognized shapes. If the artist has her way, catharses will be had. Calm transgressions will appease us. As one is satisfied, so, too, is the Other, even if describing it afterwards proves
remote.