On the occasion of the exhibition Ten Million Rooms of Yearning: Sex in Hong Kong, Para Site presents a talk by participating artist Roee Rosen.

Roee Rosen is an artist, writer and filmmaker. He is a professor at the Ha’midrasha School of Art in Israel, and at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Rosen’s work, often evoking the sardonic, disturbing and macabre, transgresses realism, fiction and the hallucinatory. Looking through the lens of the erotic, Rosen will discuss recent projects, which include Vladmir’s Night, depicting the terrorising visions of Vladmir Putin as a child, and Two Women and a Man, conjuring Justine Frank, a Jewish-Belgian surrealist pornographer and writer who died in 1943.

“What are you doing after the orgy?” Jean Baudrillard once perversely asked. I would answer: “Just read Roee Rosen.” Rosen came after the orgy, and he knows it. With Sweet Sweat, he is bringing in for a last call all the erotic avant-gardes of the West. But he can only do it with a vengeance – by writing himself into the picture. Erudite, baroque, dazzling, maniacal, and all-encompassing in his approach, Rosen keeps erasing the fine line that separates fiction and truth, imagination and reality, just as Sade and Lautréamont have done before him. But he is also keenly aware that this division doesn’t exist anymore and that all one can do is hallucinate over its existence. What makes his summa erotica erotic is that for him, as for Georges Bataille, pornography is philosophy.

—Sylvère Lotringer about Sweet Sweat, the only novel written by Justine Frank, which features an essay and biography by Rosen.

Venue kindly supported by Asia Art Archive.