IMPAKT is happy to host the first Dutch solo exhibition by Israeli artist, filmmaker and writer Roee Rosen. In video works, paintings and texts, Rosen provocatively links politics to erotica, physical intimacy, trauma and identity. In Rosen’s complex world, fact and fiction are enmeshed through both real and fictive characters, and through surprising, sometimes bizarre, scenarios.

The exhibition Roee Rosen: Poetry and Catharsis will feature his videos The Dust Channel (2016), an operetta in which a young couple and their domestic helpers all seem perversely obsessed with a Dyson vacuum cleaner, and said obsessions gradually become synonymous with xenophobia; Tse (2010), in which the Israeli political balance of power is questioned in a BDSM scene that culminates in a political exorcism; and Two Women and a Man (2005), in which Rosen himself appears in drag as an art historian and attacks his own “appropriation” of Justine Frank’s work, a fictive character Rosen created.

In addition to the video works there will be a reading room with a number of books created by Rosen. One book is written by the fictional Justine Frank, a Jewish-Belgian surrealist paint and author. Sweet Sweat is a hybrid of the pornographic novel Frank supposedly authored, her biography, and a pseudo-academic study of her provocative persona. Vladimir’s Night written by the fictional paranoiac Russian immigrant Maxim Komar-Myshkin, looks like a children book at a first glance, but turns gory as it pursues its political agenda against Vladimir Putin by having animated objects assault the Russian leader. Lastly, Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories collects several scripts, speculative texts, and political essays by Rosen.

The exhibition is open Wednesday – Sunday 12:00 – 17:00 until 26 May 2019

On Sunday 19 May at 17:00 Arjon Dunnewind and Marcel Schwierin will discuss the contexts of the provocative positions Roee Rosen takes in the event: Who Is Afraid of Roee Rosen?