documenta14 Athen: Roee Rosen - Collapsing Comedy, Erotic Politics

Roee Rosen and Marcel Schwierin present an evening dedicated to the premiere of Rosen’s new film The Dust Channel, the launch of his new book Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories, and a screening of Hilarious.

Rosen’s new film The Dust Channel (2016, 23 min) is an operetta with a Russian libretto set in the domestic environment of a bourgeois Israeli family, whose fear of dirt, dust, or any alien presence in their home takes the shape of a perverted devotion to home-cleaning appliances. Rosen associates dust figuratively with sand. The desert obliquely points to specific and current forms of xenophobia.

Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories is a book published by the Edith-Russ-Haus and Sternberg Press that consists of scripts, short writings, and a conversation of with Roee Rosen. At the heart of this collection are three provocative texts extracted from important artworks by Rosen, offered here as genre-defying literature, at the intersection between reality and fiction, speculative narrative and historical and political critique, humor and eroticism.

Hilarious (2010, 21 min), whose script is published in the book in its entirety, aims to examine the possibility of dysfunctional humor and laughter stirred when there is no reason to laugh. The stand-up performance of a female comedian copes in particular peculiar ways with disturbing, sometimes forbidden topics. Her performance not only offsets these structures through their failure, but also offers a different manifestation of these topics, which are exposed without the guise of laughter.

Parko Eleftherias, Athens Municipality Arts Center and Museum of Anti-dictatorial and Democratic Resistance, Vassilissis Sofias, Athens