Roee Rosen: Exorcisms

Internationally-acclaimed and widely exhibited since the 1990s, artist, filmmaker and writer Roee Rosen has employed numerous real and fictive personae, hybridised narratives and paradoxical stories in order to provocatively address: the instrumentalisation and ritualisation of history and historical trauma; the complex relationship of collective and personal histories; and the politics of identity. Intertwining and transforming source materials drawn from popular media, political propaganda, the history of the avant-garde, comics, and classic children’s fairy tales, Rosen’s richly referential narratives employ various styles of humour and irony, challenging and transgressing normative canons and protocols. In recent years, his practice as an artist and writer has become increasingly aware of current dilemmas regarding artistic autonomy, and the growing tendencies of oversimplification and stereotyping.

Exorcisms, Rosen’s first solo exhibition in Ireland, negotiates alternate forms and practices of devotion, possession and politicised demonology. It presents Out / (Tse), his 2010 film in which the antagonistically different political statements of two activists unfold in an erotic BDSM (domination/submission) session turning into an exorcism ritual with the sub spewing out quotes from Avigdor Lieberman, an extreme right-wing Israeli politician.

The exhibition includes a selection of works by a diasporic (and fictive) collective of ex-Soviet artists, performers, musicians and writers. The Buried Alive Group was founded by the Russian poet and artist Efim Poplavsky (1978-2011), who immigrated to Tel Aviv in the early 2000s and made work under the pseudonym Maxim Komar-Myshkin. The installation features Vladimir’s Night (2011–14), an album of verse and 39 gouaches, which was Komar-Myshkin’s magnum opus, produced in secrecy and discovered after his suicide. In this book, which is described by Rosen as a “hybrid of a children’s book, a gory martyrdom and a twisted political treatise,” animated objects come to life in order to torture and execute Vladimir Putin. The collective’s manifesto is also included as well as a selection of The Buried Alive Videos (2013), a compilation of video works supposedly produced by the group, a series of perfectly built social satires which target consumer fetishism, media-manipulation and political violence.

Exorcisms also features The Dust Channel (2016), a film operetta whose Russian libretto explores purification and the hysterical fear of dirt. Produced for documenta 14 – Learning From Athens, the absurd and politically incisive plot features a “Dyson DC07” vacuum cleaner and a bourgeois Israeli couple as its main protagonists. 

Roee Rosen’s practice entails writing and filmmaking as well as visual arts. He studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University, received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York and his MFA from Hunter College, New York.  Rosen is a professor at both HaMidrasha College of Art, Kfar-Saba, and the Bezalel Art Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. His most recent solo exhibitions and screenings include: Histoires dans la pénombre (Stories in the Dark), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); Roee Rosen Film Retrospective, Ficunam International Film Festival, Mexico City (2018); Roee Rosen – A Group Exhibition, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories, Edith-Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Oldenburg, Germany (2017). Rosen participated in documenta 14 – Learning from Athens, both in Athens and Kassel in 2017, and at steirischer herbst Graz in 2018. Rosen’s books include Justine Frank, Sweet Sweat (2009), and Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories (2017), available through Sternberg Press. Among his forthcoming shows in 2019 are solo exhibitions at IMPAKT, Utrecht and at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.

Project Arts Centre is generously supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council.

Exorcisms was produced with the kind support of Artis Exhibition Grant.