Roee Rosen: Desire and Dust

The artistic universe of Israeli artist and filmmaker Roee Rosen.

We’re all like carpets, craving suction action–or dirty, dirty is the cleaning market! –Maxim Komar-Myshkin

Can fiction be more real than reality? Can hybrids teach us about politics? How do we remember the past, and is satire a tool for both subalterns and power players? In this book, the animation of commodity objects magically connects erotic frolics and political horrors, from a DC07 vacuum cleaner to a detention center for refugees; from little irons, socks, and sweaters to the particulars of post-Soviet power and Vladimir Putin. Roee Rosen- Desire and Dust collects poems, eighteenth-century jokes, a sci-fi text based on files from Mars, a retro-garde manifesto and, in Roee Rosen’s Vengeful Animism, biographies of both objects and subjects.

Rosen has created an artistic universe that undermines normative hegemonies, using fiction and satire as he merges Israeli and global politics with myths and historical references. This book, with images of artworks, stills, and sketches, examines works from The Mosquito-Mouse and Other Hybrids and the process behind them. It includes the newly commissioned text The Dust Files, written by Paul B. Preciado, and the classic The Biography of the Object by Sergei Tretiakov as well as texts by Roee Rosen and his fictive identities, Maxim Komar-Myshkin and the Buried Alive Group.

Contributors The Buried Alive Group, Maxim Komar-Myshkin, Paul B. Preciado, Roee Rosen, Sergei Tretiakov