Roee Rosen - Justine Frank (1900-1943)

Opening Reception: Monday, April 18th, 6:30pm :: Franklin Center Café

The exhibition “Roee Rosen -- Justine Frank (1900-1943)” includes a selection of works by Rosen’s fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank.

The film “The Zionist Ventriloquist” brings together recent Israeli video-works directed by different artists and based on pop and rock tunes. Inspired by MTV-like music videos, the piece focuses on music from the Israeli repertoire, but its tone is hardly celebratory of nationalism. Seventies retro dominates, but with parodic criticality rather than nostalgia: a sexist pop song, for instance, becomes a Lesbian seduction piece, and a 1974 national hit about a 1948 soldier relentlessly reenacts all clichés of Israeli TV. Together, these works create an incommensurate, disturbing and funny patchwork reflecting present-day Israel. "The Zionist Ventriloquist" will be followed by a filmed commentary including, among others, the French philosopher and social theorist Jean Baudrillard discussing the pros and contra of Zionist ventriloquism.

Roee Rosen, Israeli-American artist and writer, lives and works in Israel. After receiving his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College, both in New York, he now teaches art and art history at Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. He has also served as contributing editor of Studio Art Magazine, where most of his theoretical writings have been published. Rosen’s work includes the painting and text installation “Live and Die as Eva Braun” (1995-1997). The work stirred a scandal when first exhibited at the Israel Museum, and was later featured as part of the exhibition Mirroring Evil, Nazi Imagery, Recent Art at the Jewish Museum, New York, 2001. Rosen is the author of “Sweet Sweat “(Babel Publishers, 2001), and is currently working on a fiction book entitled “Ziona™”, about an Israeli super-heroine.

Roee Rosen - Justine Frank (1900-1943): A Selection