artists

Roee Rosen

1963, Rehovot, IL Lives in Tel Aviv, IL

The Confessions of Roee Rosen, 2008 HD Video, 56’30” Confessions Coming Soon, 2007 HD Video, 8’ 40’’ Frosted Self-Portraits, 2004–2006 Gouache on paper, 50 × 32.5 cm Professionals, 1994–1996 Oil on paper, 100 × 66 cm Martyr Paintings, 1991–1994 Oil on paper, acrylic, pastel, and spray paint on paper, 75 × 57.5 cm

TRENTO

In Israel, Roee Rosen is known not only as a virtuoso painter but also as a novelist, intellectual and teacher. His work reflects this hybrid quality, reinventing painting as part of a conceptual, often narrative, framework and producing books that elude classification.
The Confessions of Roee Rosen begins with the artist’s announcement that he is about to die. He disavows a career replete with lies, scandals, and fake identities. However, his confession are delivered by three surrogates – all foreign female workers residing in Israel – who deliver the monologues in Hebrew, a language they do not speak. Their monologues are based on Rosen’s life but are simultaneously plausible as statements a foreign worker might make. Tackling such charged themes as the exploitative representation of the Holocaust or scatological fantasies, the confessions constitute a peculiar speech act in which the speakers ignore what they say.
Three series of Rosen’s paintings are also on display at Manifesta 7. Martyr Paintings pursue an emphatically broad spectrum of stylistic quotations to suggest a twilight zone between faith and myth, hagiography and pornography. Professionals use the same perverted childhood photo of the artist to depict a potentially infinite range of professional roles. Frosted Self-Portraits render the artist as either a piece of chocolate or a piece of shit (following Dali’s claim that beauty should be edible).

Location

TRENTO

ANSELM FRANKE/HILA PELEG: "THE SOUL (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)"

PALAZZO DELLE POSTE, VIA S.S. TRINITA’ 27, I-38100 TRENTO, ITALY

Palazzo_delle_poste-foto_giovanni_cavulli__archivio_ufficio_stampa_pat

This project proposes to examine today’s Europe not as an expanding geopolitical entity but in regard to the engineering of its psyche or soul. Trento, the city of the historic Council of Trent and of this part of Manifesta 7, provides the immediate background for the project.
As an archeology of reversals between inside and outside, self and other, individual and collective, The Soul follows the historical turning-inwards of the expansionist boundaries of European modernity and suggests that the production, mobilization, and representation of the inner self is a final frontier, a last outside.
Here the soul is not understood or treated as fact but as a cultural object, an allegory for social relations shaped by ideas and techniques of power. Much like the “discovery” of a continent, these techniques have produced and invented an entity they declared to map objectively. And yet this entity, the psyche—if only as the difference between material and immaterial, body and mind, object and subject—has never been entirely contained by positivist science. Its properties (emotion, memory, imagination, fantasy, self-consciousness) remain haunted by its own otherness, a minefield of displacements.
It was in Trento that the catholic doctrine of the relation between the soul and representation was articulated some five hundred years ago. And it was here that the rules for Christian confession were expanded to include purely projective, imaginary deeds and thoughts, thus marking an important step in the construction of the modern European self: the policing and self-policing of the interior.
This history unfolds in the exhibition as a set of miniature museums, which sketch possible, alternative, or incomplete histories of the psyche and the soul. These are study displays that investigate the embodiment of power in its affective and cognitive dimensions, experiment with the tradition of the museum, and bring into focus the paradoxes of a “European normality”, the relation between soul and image, nonphonetic pedagogy, structures of feelings, the logic of desires, psychological personality tests, and the history of antipsychiatry.
Next to this series of speculative museums, The Soul brings together recent and specially commissioned works by over thirty artists working in Europe and elsewhere. Some contributions engage with the site of the exhibition and its regional, political, and historical context. Others take the form of “deep” historical research, confronting the mythical contents of European history with the technologies of power and the power of cultural technologies. The entire exhibition is a search for languages capable of identifying and articulating new forms of exclusion and possibilities for reversing forms of social control.
Anselm Franke/Hila Peleg
THE SOUL
(or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)
CONTRIBUTORS
Nader Ahriman, Maria Thereza Alves / Jimmie Durham / Michael Taussig, Tamy Ben-Tor, Attila Bruni, Beth Campbell, Fabio Campolongo, Marcus Coates, Peter Coffin, Keren Cytter, Jos De Gruyter / Harald Thys, Massimiliano & Gianluca De Serio, Brigid Doherty, Omer Fast, Peter Friedl, Stefano Graziani, Tom Holert / Claudia Honecker, Karl Holmqvist, Hannah Hurtzig, Joachim Koester, Andree Korpys / Markus Löffler, Kuehn Malvezzi, Daria Martin, Angela Melitopoulos, Xisco Mensua, Valérie Mréjen, Rabih Mroué, Andreas Müller, Sina Najafi / Christopher Turner, Rosalind Nashashibi, Luigi Ontani, Ria Pacquée, Bernd Ribbeck, Pietro Roccasalva, Roee Rosen, Christoph Ruckhäberle, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Florian Schneider, Eyal Sivan, Josef Strau, Javier Tellez, Althea Thauberger, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Barbara Visser, Klaus Weber,
Eyal Weizman
Texts in Pubblication:
Franco Berardi, Brigid Doherty, Tom Holert, Maurizio Lazzarato, Eva Meyer, Avi Pitchon, Renata Salecl, Michael Taussig, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Eyal Weizman, et al.