[NoHo Arts District, CA] – This month’s LA Art blog features Tania Franco Klein’s Mercado de Sonora, the artist’s newest photographic series, examining belief, ritual, and inherited superstition through carefully staged images inspired by the legendary Mercado de Sonora in Mexico City.
Tania Franco Klein and the Mercado de Sonora Series
As we bid farewell to 2025, many of us come to a natural rumination on our lives. This may take the form of new (or renewed) commitments to self or others, or perhaps a review of what we’ve accomplished or endured in a lookback. The cap of the holidays may also have us assessing our relationship with the material. Need versus want, or perhaps what will help us in the new year, in contrast to what has worked against us, or cluttered our minds and domiciles. Often, we adorn ourselves throughout the year with both physical artifacts (perhaps clothing, trinkets, houseware) as well as with healing or reparative items (hair serum, moisturizers), but social exhaustion or stress of the turn of a new year may have us seeking more spiritual curation.
For her latest series, Mercado de Sonora (2019), Tania Franco Klein turns her focus to The Mercado de Sonora, a traditional (though unconventional) market in southeast Mexico City. After years of producing photographic work outside of her native Mexico, she turns her lens back toward her country of origin. Earlier projects often positioned Klein herself as the subject – frequently disguised by a wig, performing for the camera. In this series, however, the artist steps aside. Her mother and grandmother take her place, transforming the project into an expanded self-portrait that unfolds across generations and examines how systems of belief, ritual, and superstition are quietly inherited.
The Mercado de Sonora is a sprawling market known for its sale of occult objects and spiritual services. Klein describes it as a rare site where economic divisions temporarily collapse: people from vastly different social strata arrive with the same desire: to seek protection, healing, or control over uncertain circumstances. The market’s internal order is highly stratified by sex. Women typically sell spells and charms, while men dominate the trade in animals. Interwoven with candles, powders, and Santa Muerte figurines is a dense, disturbing trade in trafficked wildlife. Animals are packed into cages, layered atop one another, often suffocating before they ever reach their destination. Most do not survive transport; those that do are frequently used in Santería rituals or sold as exotic pets to the children of narco families. Despite its visibility, this trade has long been tolerated by authorities, and photography within the market is strictly prohibited.
Rather than attempt to document the space directly, Klein displaces it. She removes the objects from the public chaos of the marketplace and situates them inside private interiors. This shift in setting allows her to ask a different question: what happens to belief after it leaves the stall and enters the home? The photographs that result are carefully staged yet emotionally unresolved, filled with longing and quiet tension. Nothing feels incidental. Each gesture and object functions like evidence, suggesting unseen actions and emotional stakes just beyond the frame.
Across these carefully constructed yet unsettling images, Klein fragments both the human figure and the magical object. Women appear partially obscured or disembodied; spells are reduced to remnants and components. Together, they reflect a society in which belief persists despite systemic violence, poverty, and environmental collapse. In Mercado de Sonora, enchantment is neither naïve nor triumphant. It is tentative, improvised, and deeply human – held onto even when its promises remain unfulfilled.
Artist Link:
https://www.taniafrancoklein.com
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