BERLIN.- Omer Fast (* 1972) is one of the most distinctive film and video artists of his generation. He creates narrations in his films that question the borders between one's own and media narratives and between current and historic events. His works address the friction between documentary and fiction.
The Martin-Gropius-Bau is showing seven of his projects at his first large solo exhibition in Berlin.
Shown are: CNN Concatenated from 2002, Looking Pretty for God (after G.W.) from 2008, 5000 Feet is the Best from 2011, Continuity from 2012, Everything That Rises Must Converge from 2013, Spring from 2016, as well as a new work called August from 2016. Shot in 3D, August is based on the life and work of renowned Cologne photographer August Sander (1876-1964). In surreal dream sequences, the artist is haunted at the end of life by the death of his son and the figures he photographed.
In his cinematic works, Fast tells stories of trauma, war and relationships. Our impulse to identify with the people whose stories we witness, is often undermined by conflicting accounts, inexplicable changes or outright lies. Everything that we know and believe could be entirely different. Omer Fast's films are more than thought experiments or games between narration and enactment. They are simultaneously oppressive and moving. In addition to presenting projection-based works in customary dark spaces, the artist has also created three new installations resembling waiting rooms: a doctor’s clinic, an airport lounge and an immigration office. These waiting rooms feature older monitorbased works and are also sites for performances planned for the exhibition.
Omer Fast is a video artist based in Berlin. Much of his work delves into the psychology of contemporary trauma, often relying on the blurring of memory and the retelling of actual events through cinematic convention. Fast’s work moves beyond the formalities of the genre, pushing through reality and non-reality of his subject matter, and is ultimately about the status of the image as a tool to disseminate information, both real and manufactured. One of his newer pieces, “Remainder” (2015), is an original work based on an adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s novel of the same name. This is the artist’s first feature length film, and tells the story of an unnamed young man who, after suffering a horrific head trauma caused by “technology parts and bits” falling from the sky, remembers nothing and no one of his life before. The film follows the man through the aftermath of the accident as he struggles to establish an identity, left with only fragments of memories from his past.
Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972 and grew up between Israel and New York. He received a BFA from Tufts University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1995, and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City in 2000. In October 2015, a monographic exhibition of Fast’s work opened at the Jeu de Paume Paris which traveled to the Baltic Center of Contemporary Arts, Gateshead, and the KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin in 2016. His work has been featured in dOCUMENTA (13), the 54th Venice Biennale, and the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennials. In addition, he has been the subject of a solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Le Caixa, Barcelona; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO; and at the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
Fast’s work is included in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Musuem of American Art in New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Fast Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
