Roee Rosen

Roee Rosen is an Israeli multidisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker.

Roee Rosen was born in Rehovot in 1963. He studied philosophy and comparative literature studies in Tel Aviv University until 1984 and graduated with BFA from School of Visual Arts, New York in 1989. Rosen received MFA from Hunter College in New York in 1991. He is a professor at Ha Midrasha College of Art in Kfar-Saba and at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.

Invented figures

As part of his art, Rosen invented non existing artists. His first virtual artist was Justine Frank (1900-1943), a Jewish-Belgian surrealist painter who also authored the pornographic novel "Sweet Sweat." In both art and writings Frank combined explicit erotic imagery with Jewish tropes and magical elements, thus assuming a highly polemic and disturbing position. She later worked in Palestine despite appearing to be antagonistic to Zionism and refusing to speak Hebrew. The fabrication of the project entailed a book combining Frank's own novel with her biography and a theoretical essay, a retrospective of Frank's works, and a film, "Two Women and a Man" (2005). Rosen's second principle fictive artist is Maxim Komar-Myshkin (1978-2011), a pseudonym for Russian emigrant poet and painter Efim Poplavsky, born in 1978 and immigrated to Israel in 2003. Komar-Myshkin established the "Buried Alive" collective, a group of Ex-Soviet artists who disavowed the culture surrounding them, describing themselves as "Russian cultural zombies." The project thus entailed fabricating the work of the collective as well as that of Poplavsky. Komar-Myshkin, according to the story, suffered acute paranoia and believed he is persecuted by Vladimir Putin. In his major work, the album "Vladimir's Night." he takes his revenge on the Russian president. Produced in secrecy and supposedly discovered after the artist's death, it describes still objects assuming life so as to murder Vladimir. The second part of the book offers annotation by yet another fictive character, Rosa Chabanova, a hybrid of fiction, political writings and theory.

Justin Frank exhibition in Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Maxim Komar-Myshkin exhibition in Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Maxim Komar-Myshkin exhibition in Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Rosen has exhibited all over the world with different media, including paintings, video art, installations, multimedia, artist books and writing.

Solo

"Roee Rosen – A Group Exhibition" in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2016 featured Rosen's different personae as well as his films and books. Also in 2016 Rosen held a survey exhibition entitled "Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories", at the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg, Germany. Rosen's installation "Live and Die as Eva Braun" was first exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (1997), where it caused controversy, concerning the representation of the holocaust. In 2012 he had a one person exhibition entitled "Vile, Evil Veil" in INIVA Institute of International Visual Arts in London. Rosen's first retrospective was held at Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, under the title "The Dynamic Dead Roee Rosen" (2011). His exhibitions also included multiple shows in Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israeli Arts Museum in Ramat Gan.

Group

Roee Rosen participated in numerous group exhibitions. Some notable exhibitions include participation in AV Festival in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2016, "Gender in art" in Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, "Animism" at Haus der kulturen der welt in Berlin (2012), The Taipei Biennial (2012), The Sixth Moscow Biennial, Manifesta 7 in Trento (2008), "Host & Guest" exhibition the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, "Cargo-Cult" in Bat Yam Museum of Art, "Alias" in The Bunkier Sztuki Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, "Aesthetikos" in Haifa Museum of Art, "Mirroring Evil, Nazi Imagery, recent Art" at The Jewish Museum in New York (2002) and others.

Films by Roee Rosen include:

Two Women and a Man, 2005, 17 minutes. Rosen himself appears as a female scholar to discuss the work of Justine Frank, and to critically assault himself. The film premiered at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, where it won a special mention.

The Confessions of Roee Rosen, 2008, 57 minutes. Rosen's "confessions" are delivered by three surrogates: illegal female labor migrants. They speak in Hebrew without understanding the language by reading a transliteration of the text. The film is also a musical, with the music performed by an ensemble made excludively of women musician. The film premiered at FID Marseille, where it won a special mention.

Tse (Out), 2010, 34 minutes. The central scene is a BDSM session wherein the submissive responds to the pain by emitting sentence, which are all quotes from the right-wing politician Avigdor Lieberman, then Israel's minister of foreign affairs. An erotic exchange is thus set as a political exorcism. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Orizzonti award for best medium-length film. It went on to receive numerous other awards.

The Buried Alive Videos, 2013, 36 minutes. The film is, supposedly, a compilation of six shorts produced over a span of a decade by The Buried Alive Collective. The film premiered at the Rome International Film Festival. Among other awards it won the best film award at the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival.

• Justine Frank: Sweet Sweat. Lukas & Sternberg. 2009. ISBN 1933128666. 
• Maxim Komar-Myshkin - Vladimir's Night. Sternberg Press. 2014. ISBN 3956790596. 
• The Blind Merchant (1989-1991). Sternberg Press. 2016. ISBN 978-3-95679-186-4.