Roee Rosen
The paintings, films, and writings of Israeli artist Roee Rosen (born 1963 in Rehovot, Israel) have become known for their historical and theological consciousness, novelistic imagination, and psychological ambition. His work addresses the representation of history, the political economy of memory, and the politics of identity, often exploring the tension between trauma, horror, humor, and truth.
Rosen received degrees in visual art from the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College, both in New York. He now lives in Israel, where he teaches art and art history at Bezalel Academy of Art and at Beit Berl College. In 1997 Rosen's controversial exhibition “Live and Die as Eva Braun” at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, was aggressively attacked by Israeli politicians. It won critical praise, however, for its new approach to the representation of the memory of the Holocaust. Rosen's projects include the exhibition “Justine Frank (1900–1943): A Retrospective” (2009) and the films Two Women and a Man (2005) and The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2008). He has authored the books A Different Face (Shva, 2000), Lucy (Shadurian, 2000), Sweet Sweat (Babel, 2001), and Ziona™ (Keter, 2007).has invented
2023
bilingual edition (English / German)
Sternberg Press
Publication based on Roee Rosen's film Kafka for Kids, a cross-generic film combining a fiction drama with a documentary and a musical. The law as a central motif in Kafka's writings, and the fact that the film, supposedly, addresses children, lead to an exposition of the complex and troubling ways in which childhood is legally defined in the Palestinian occupied territories.
2020
English edition
Sternberg Press
In this book, the animation of commodity objects magically ties together erotic frolics and political horrors: from a DC07 vacuum cleaner to a detention center for refugees, from little irons, socks and sweaters, to the particulars of post-Soviet power, and Vladimir Putin.
2017
bilingual edition (English / German)
Sternberg Press - Fiction
sold out
At the heart of this collection of short writings are three provocative texts extracted from important artworks by Rosen, offered here as genre-defying literature at the intersection between reality and fiction, speculative narrative and historical-political critique, humor and eroticism.
2016
English edition
Sternberg Press - Monographs and artists' books
sold out
An artist book juxtaposing text and image, history and its revision, The Blind Merchant provides the reader with alternative written and drawn narratives to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice adopting the point of view of Jewish moneylender Shylock.
2014
English edition
Sternberg Press - Fiction
The chimerical final work by Maxim Komar-Myshkin, one of the most elusive and tragic figures in Israeli-Russian art.
2009
English edition
Sternberg Press - Fiction
sold out
Erudite, baroque, a dazzling writer and painter but maniacal and all-encompassing in his approach, Roee Rosen keeps erasing the fine line that separates fiction and truth, imagination and reality, just as Sade and Lautréamont have done before him. But this division doesn't exist anymore. What makes his summa erotica erotic is that, for him as for Georges Bataille, pornography is philosophy.
