#147: Roee Rosen

Friday, 17 January 2025, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
Eintritt frei | admission free

Roee Rosen is known for his multilayered and provocative work which often challenges the divides between history and the present, documentary and fiction, politics and erotics. For Rosen—with his background in philosophy, literature, and visual arts—humor is a tool that he has rehearsed and mastered for years. But laughter is only a side-effect of trespassing between the places, lands, and nations, between what constitutes the work of historians, the results of political actions and their impact, and what is the work of the imaginary.

Rosen dedicated years to his fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as well as a book (Sweet Sweat, Sternberg Press, 2009), and a short film, Two Women and a Man (2005). Rosen’s second major fictive persona, Maxim Komar-Myshkin, was supposedly a Russian poet and artist whose magnum opus, Vladimir’s Night (Sternberg Press, 2014), is an album of images and verse wherein animism converges violently with current Russian politics. The fiction expanded to include an entire collective of like-minded ex-Soviet artists, as well as their manifesto.

Roee Rosen, who will be present, will show:

OUT (“TSE”), 2010, 34 min
OUT presents a domination/ submission scene set in a mundane living room. The increasing pain prompts the sub to spew out not only cries of pleasure and pain, but also sentences. The scene thus connotes both confessions under torture, and rituals of exorcism. The utterances of the demon who speaks through the sub are all quotes of Avigdor Lieberman, one of the most extreme right wing politicians in Israel.

The ritual is framed by two scenes. A preceding interview with the two participants seems at the beginning to be a straightforward documentary, but transforms into an exposition of the narrative premise by which one is possessed, the other an exorcist. The final musical scene is a song set to the words of the Russian poet Esenin’s Letter to Mother. Executed as a one-shot, the song is a direct, if twisted, homage to the final scene of another film that deals with radical sexuality and politics: Dusan Makavejev’s WR, The Mystery of the Organism.

OUT Premiered at the 67th Venice Film Festival, where it won the Orizzonti award for best medium-length film.

The Dust Channel, 2016, 23 min
The Dust Channel is a cultural exquisite corpse: an operetta with a libretto in Russian about a British home appliance, a Dyson DC07 Vacuum Cleaner, set in an Israeli reality of private perversion and socio-political phobias. While each of these layers offers its own particular resonances and substrata, they share in common the emergence of communal and private forms of xenophobia from within the private sphere of leisure and pleasure, abundance and perversions.

The Russian text is an animation chant, meant to bring to life the vacuum cleaner by telling it its own history. The diegesis offers a different story altogether: a ménage à trois between a handsome, affluent couple, and their DC07. While this narrative wilfully offers itself as an insular, private affair, dirt and dust are associated figuratively with sand and the desert, obliquely pointing at a specific site of xenophobia: the detention center “Holot,” wherein political refugees, unrecognised as such by the State of Israel, are detained.

Explaining the Law to Kwame, 2020, 23 min
In this monologue a legal theorist explores the ways in which the Israeli military law in the occupied territories tackles the problem of defining, judging and punishing Palestinian children. The approach she tries is to imagine a listener removed in time and space. Her speech, however, lapses into musings on aging, illness and sexuality. A different, shorter cut of the monologue appears in Roee Rosen’s feature Kafka for Kids (2022). Explaining the Law premiered at FIDMarseille, where it won both the CNAP and The Flash awards.  

       

Roee Rosen (b. 1963) is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker and writer. Several retrospectives of Rosen’s cinema were held, among them at the Oberhausen film festival (2012), and FICUNAM festival, Mexico City (2018). In 2018 an expansive one person exhibition was held at Centre Pompidou, Paris, entitled Histoires dans le pénombre. The exhibition also included a full film survey.

In 2022 Rosen released Kafka For Kids, a feature-length musical comedy combining fiction, animation and political and legal documentary elements.  

Rosen recent expansive solo exhibition in Germany was held at Kunstverein Hannover, entitled The Kafka Companion to Wellness (November 2024 – January 2025). His latest published books are, Distanz will publish Rosen’s artist book, The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Roee Rosen (Distanz and KVH, 2024), and the Hebrew edition of Lucy is Sick (Pardes Publishing, 2024), a novel that tackles cancer in the guise of a coloring book, whose first were published by Steirischer Herbst in 2020.