Toaster (self-portrait)

Franco Klein's practice is self-reflective and focuses mainly on social behavior and the idea that as a society we are obsessed with production, success, multi-tasking, optimizing, and self-improvement, fueling a collective and deeply rooted sense of anxiety and isolation led mainly by media overstimulation. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han says that we live in an era of exhaustion and fatigue, caused by an incessant compulsion to perform. We now experience the neuronal era characterized by neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, burnout syndrome, and bipolar disorder. Franco Klein centers this premise at the chore of her fragmented cinematic and vivid photographs which exist in multilayered innovative narrative installations. Her female characters exist almost anonymously, melting in places, vanishing into them, constantly looking for any possibility of escape. They find themselves alone, desperate, and exhausted. This body of work has been shown in several group and solo shows and became her first publication "Positive Disintegration", which was nominated for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation Book Award. Edition: 1 of 1