Katrien Franken is a Dutch photographer. Her oeuvre ranges from documentary photography and still lifes to portraiture and film. Throughout her career, Franken has been investigating the relations and tensions between the emotional and the intellectual, and the complexity between the seen and unseen. Franken perceives Life as a proposal to be in a constant dialogue with other experiences, to experience new realities in a multiplicity of each other’s experience; each other’s world, as a representation of the external world we create. 

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Significant for her relationship with reality is the inner work and her long-term personal development orientation – psychological and spiritual studies, practices, exchanges, and contemplative experiences, that form part of her curiosity to perceive the Other worlds. A world and a life inspired by trans- contextualities as both structure and philosophy, which as a practice may have been given to her through birth as she is part of an identical twin.​ Her birth certificate offered something along these lines: “Be prepared that disturbance of similarities contrasts with normal experience. There are layers and layers of information hidden in the unseen that beholds a beauty, a bewildering, a wondering, and questioning aspect of what is real. Be aware of what you are working-with.”​ Growing up as part of an identical twin was a proposal of becoming ‘other', and of 'seeing' experiences. Seeing to meet an expansion and shift in perception, which, of course, is also about negotiating with the wandering parts in doublures, from Old French doubler: to make double.

"My identical twin sister and I biologically share an organisation and relation of thoughts and feelings and experiences that are vivid and present, but partly not our own. I am therefore a doublure; without necessity occurring more than once. We share a symbiosis and are perhaps symbionts, rather than subjects of similarities, which is not a vision of perfect harmony or sameness  – far from it. We are sharing an equally valid and responsible Life of more-than-ourselves world."

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In Franken's coming-of-age, and within this shared space of resemblance and overlap, she learned to appreciate the strange and perplexing nature of seeing, also 'seeing' for herself. It taught her that she is who she is because of everything else, including the parts she can’t perceive. It helped her to question the question of what was being perceived, and by whom. With this history, she developed early on a deep curiosity about the hidden relationships between her world and other worlds – a contemplative process she practiced intensely as a photographer between 2006 and 2017.

Her early work drew her to empty places. An empty library would show great beauty to her because the autonomy of the building, of the place, came into its prime. She began to wonder: what happens in places after the loss of functional or important usage, when the expediencies of daily routines have become superfluous? In all of her work, she has been deeply engaged with the unseen, and with repetitions and doublures. At a certain moment, she began layering portraits, in search of something. She was puzzled by her own fragmented self, looking for something whole that she couldn’t find. 

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"I don’t quite understand how we are convinced of our existence as separate beings. And I don’t think it’s about seeing perse (ourselves as unique), but about the places from where we find our unique way of seeing, to understand the relationship of what we are being perceived by. It is not impossible to imagine for the interpretation of the world to change when we begin feeling with this deeper."

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Her propensity to blur the lines between different disciplines reveal her drive to constantly renew herself. ​One day, she stopped photographing altogether, at least until now. Franken is currently developing and offering transformative learning programs and breathwork in service of Life through her organisation Open Up, which she founded in 2015. www.openup.world

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