Break in Case of Emergency (Flies, Forks, and Fires): Tania Franco Klein

Tania Franco Klein

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

13 May - 3 June 2023

ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present Break in Case of Emergency, the latest project by Mexican photographer Tania Franco Klein.

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.

Tania Franco Klein (b. 1990) is a Mexican artist currently working with photography, GIF, and installation. She started her 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.

Through the use of large-scale cinematic and vivid photographs, which exist in multilayered fragmented installations -- composed of murals, videos, and framed photographs, her practice mainly centers around the examination of modern anxieties and the performative stresses that come from living life online with a constant fixation on self-improvement, productivity, the effects of media overstimulation, and the way we profile ourselves and others into fitting our understanding of today's eclectic and fragmented realities.