Roee Rosen: The Kafka Companion to Wellness

Roee Rosen has carved out a singular position in the arts with his cast of fictitious, part-fictitious, and real-life characters which, for over three decades now, have appeared across a variety of media, from gouaches to paintings to film, books, and installations.

“Those of you who heard of me, know that I have built my entire career on lies, scandals, obscene pictures, fake identities. I have pretended not to be myself. No more. It is urgent to do the right, difficult thing,” says the artist in The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2007), portrayed by three illegal labor migrants. In Two Women and a Man (2005), on the other hand, Rosen appears in person, but as a fictitious female scholar delivering a television interview about Justine Frank, an obscure Surrealist painter who, in fact, never existed, yet her works are found in numerous collections. Aside from creating a cinematic narrative, Rosen has fabricated Frank’s whole oeuvre of oil paintings and gouaches, complete with personal photographs and a book (Sweet Sweat, Sternberg Press, 2009). Through her biography, he speaks of an impossible past and imagines a different present. Poetic as they are, Rosen’s works draw upon the extremes of human existence: life, death, and sexuality, deployed as one of the driving forces in his scenarios. Maxim Komar-Myshkin, another character brought to life by Rosen, is a Russian dissident artist and émigré. Obsessed with the thought of being assasinated by Vladimir Putin, Myshkin took his own life in 2011, leaving behind a series of gouaches conceived as a grim fairy tale—both a testimony to his own gripping paranoia and an ultimate act of retaliation—in which his nemesis is the victim of a delirious sequence of events as his unsatiated appetite for satisfaction blurs the borders between dream and reality.

Rosen crafts layered narratives that feed off culture, politics and, inevitably, his own experience. His recent film, Kafka for Kids (2022), takes the form of a pilot episode for a TV program for children. Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis is itself transformed into a psychedelic séance that draws out the superb simplicity of the writer’s idea of what it means to wake up one day as a cockroach, as well the political ramifications of such a predicament. No matter how close or distant his characters and references are, Rosen remains implicated in all of them. For Lucy is Sick (2020–2024), the artist created a coloring book for adults that is an account of dealing with an illness—an experience that is impossible to grasp solely from the use of dry, technical terms and which yearns to be filled out with personal content. For The Gaza War Tattoos (2024), Rosen similarly makes use of an oxymoronic language, as he had been throughout his practice, to put in perspective the sense of safety and its lack.

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. “I am Roee Rosen,” one of his three effigies further reveals in Confessions: “I was born in a small, dismal village in Israel, four years before 1967. My wonderful parents have bequeathed me a feeling heart; for them, it was the source of their felicity, for me, it was the foundation of all my misfortunes. Everything was painful, and the pains of others were even more unbearable than my own.”

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s book The Standard Edition published by Distanz Verlag and Kunstverein Hannover.

Roee Rosen. A Kafka Companion To Wellness at Kunstverein Hannover, spanning over a hundred works,  is his first solo presentation in Germany in nearly a decade. Curated by Christoph Platz-Gallus and Krzysztof Kosciuczuk.

Accompanying events
Roee Rosen (artist) & Henriette Gallus (deputy director Haus der Kulturen der Welt [HKW]), artist talk, November 8, 2024, 8:30pm

Marcel Schwierin (director Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, filmmaker & curator), Das Grauen kommt heim, introduction to Roee Rosen’s work with films and discussion, November 14, 2024, 6pm

Marcel Schwierin (director Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, filmmaker & curator), Kalter Schweiß, introduction to Roee Rosen’s work with films and discussion, December 4, 2024, 6pm

Meron Mendel (director Bildungsstätte Anne Frank & author) & Saba-Nur Cheema (political scientist & author), Muslimisch-jüdisches Abendbrot. Das Miteinander in Zeiten der Polarisierung (2024), book presentation and discussion, November 28, 2024, 6pm

Roee Rosen (artist), Ekaterina Degot (director & chief curator steirischer herbst), David Riff (senior curator steirischer herbst & author), discussion, January 11, 2025, 6pm

Cinematic screenings of Roee Rosen’s Kafka for Kids take place at the Kommunales Kino (KoKi) Hannover on: November 13, 2024, 5pm; December 11, 2024, 5pm; and January 8, 2025, 3pm.

Press contact: Nane Anna Bohn, presse@kunstverein-hannover.de