The Confessions of Roee Rosen
Roee Rosen
2009
Book that accompanied Roee Rosen's exhibition “The Confessions of Roee Rosen"
at The CCA, Tel Aviv, curated by Sergio Edelsztein. The book was designed as a secret prayer book, around the text from the work Confessions. Confessions begins where Roee Rosen declares that now that he is about to die, he disavows a career replete with lies, scandals and fake identities, and joins the confessional tradition. These confessions, however, are delivered by three female surrogates—Roee Rosen 1, 2 and 3—illegal foreign workers residing in Israel. They deliver the monologues in Hebrew, a language they do not speak. The text is built as a hybrid: on the one hand, it offers a rather dubious account of the artist’s own “crimes,” but on the other hand, it is partially plausible as a monologue of a foreign worker.
- Design: Noa Shwartz, Koby Barchad
- Texts: Roee Rosen, Sergio Edelsztein, Hila Peleg, Jean-Pierre Rehm
- Translation: Aya Breuer, Roee Rosen
- Pages: 118
- Type of binding: hardcover
- Dimensions (cm): 14x20
- Printing: A.R. Printing Ltd
- Publication: CCA - The Center for Contemporary Art
- Place of publication: Tel Aviv-Jaffa
- Book photography: Yair Meyuhas
Roee Rosen (born 1963 in Rehovot) is an Israeli-American multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and writer known for his multilayered, provocative works that blur the lines between history and the present, documentary and fiction, and politics and erotica. Educated in philosophy and literature at Tel Aviv University before earning a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (1989) and an MFA from Hunter College (1991), Rosen is a professor at Beit Berl College’s HaMidrasha Faculty of the Arts and at the Bezalel Academy. He is known for fabricating intricate fictional personas like Justine Frank and Maxim Komar-Myshkin, and for works such as Live and Die as Eva Braun, The Blind Merchant, The Dust Channel, and Kafka for Kids. His films Out (or Tse) and The Buried Alive Videos have garnered international acclaim, and his work has been exhibited worldwide in institutions such as Centre Pompidou, documenta 14, and in retrospectives.
