Roee Rosen: Kafka for Kids, with Hani Furstenberg – Volksbühne Berlin

Performance

English

Introduction: Marcel Schwierin

Dienstag, 14.05.2019

21 Uhr

Artist, writer, and filmmaker Roee Rosen’s Berlin premiere of his ongoing project Kafka for Kids, which begins from the humourous attempt to make Franz Kafka’s disturbing and multi-layered stories accessible for toddlers. The evening at Grüner Salon takes this project as a starting point for a larger discussion on what are appropriate materials and behaviours for children, problematizing the idea of childhood and naivete as a privileged perspective on life. Introduced by Marcel Schwierin, director of Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst and long-time curator of Rosen, the evening starts with new film and visual materials, shown here for the first time. The materials are taken from his current, brutally surreal series Kafka for Kids and combine elements from comic-drama fiction, documentary, musical, and include animations based on the artist’s drawings. The program then moves to consider childhood from a wholly other perspective: the troubling intricacies of how the Israeli military law defines childhood in the occupied Palestinian territories. Hani Furstenberg, an accomplished actor and long-time collaborator of Rosen’s, appears as a fictitious legal scholar, offering a strangely eroticized and logically opaque explanation of the Kafkaesque legal reality of the occupation.

Roee Rosen’s work in film, drawing, writing, and performance proposes alternative worlds related to ours, but separated by farce, tragedy, and near-truths. He often imagines historical figures or attaches unsubstantiated histories to existing ones; he weaves wishful and humorous twists into current events, bringing history or politics to their illogical extremes. He has explored such figures as the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Vladimir Putin, Franz Kafka, and Eva Braun.

Hani Furstenberg is an actor known for her international appearances onstage and onscreen.Her early career was spent in Israel, where she starred in TV series and award-winning films such as Yossi and Jagger and Campfire and was a regular cast member in Tel Aviv’s The Cameri theater. Since 2010, she has been based in NYC and has starred in internationally acclaimed films such as The Loneliest Planet and The Golem, among others.

A collaboration between Volksbühne, Berlin and Edith-Russ-Haus