Among the personal belongings of Russian poet Efim Poplavsky, who fled to Tel Aviv during the late 1990s under an assumed name, was a folio of more than 30 pages of drawings and texts devoted to Vladimir Putin. Discovered by fellow members of the dissident group Buried Alive, after Poplavsky took his own life in a bout of paranoia, the folio was subsequently published as Vladimir’s Night (2014) by Israeli artist Roee Rosen. On view as part of Rosen’s current retrospective, ‘Kafka for Kids & Other Troubling Tales’, the document reads as a fairy tale in which a quiet meal enjoyed by the Russian president dissolves into gory torture that eventually leads to Putin’s demise. ‘Or maybe he’s asleep,’ reads the last verse, ‘Or maybe not. Remember dear, with Vladimir, things are not what they appear.’

The line also holds true for Rosen himself: it transpires that the poet, the dissident group and even the scholar who annotated the text are all figments of the artist’s imagination. The series, ‘Maxim Komar-Myshkin: Vladimir’s Night’ (2011–14), is characteristic of Rosen’s approach to storytelling. Across nine rooms of Kunstmuseum Luzern, his three-decade practice – comprising films, drawings, paintings and photographs – brings to life entire universes populated with plausible characters that bridge reality and fiction.

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