Overview

Roee Rosen's recent works undermine the viewer's connection to reality by blurring the limit between reality and the imagination. Rosen is interested in the invention of alternative biographies and the creation of various forms of deception that give rise to a multilayered, enigmatic identity. In this video project, the artist tells his fictional life story in the form of a confession, which is recounted in three monologues delivered by three women who have come to Israel as foreign workers. The title of this work alludes to two texts that have decisively influenced Western culture - St. Augustine's Confessions and the Confessions of Jean-Jacque Rousseau - thus implying an affinity with a long line of thinkers who confessed their sins. The women who are seemingly confessing in the artist's name do not speak Hebrew, and read a transcription of the text off a teleprompter. Their gestures are incompatible with the contents of the text they are reading - an incongruity that is at once unsettling and comic. The women's status as foreign workers points to a larger concern with gender and race-based exploitation and inequality in Israeli society.