Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007, Film Still, Fotograf Nicholas Trikonis, © Omer Fast.
Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007, Film Still, Fotograf Nicholas Trikonis, © Omer Fast.
Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007, Film Still, Fotograf Nicholas Trikonis, © Omer Fast.
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MUMOK
Museum Moderner Kunst
Stiftung Ludwig Vienna
MuseumsQuartier
Museumsplatz 1
Vienna
MUMOK Factory
Omer Fast, The Casting
October 5, 2007-January 20, 2008
Omer Fast’s work addresses the status of experience and history in a society that is marked by the media of film and television. His video installations analyze the transformation of experience into memory and how this results in stories. How are memories transmitted, how are they collected, selected, recorded and communicated?
During his first individual presentation in Vienna, Fast will be showing two new works: The Casting and De Grote Boodschap. Both develop these questions from two different vantage points. The basis for the multiple projections in The Casting is comprised of interviews which Fast made in 2006 with members of US forces before they were about to return to duty in Iraq. The stories were then presented in film as “frozen” images, leaving them to merge together in an interplay of the imagined past and the present, the authentic event and its description after the fact.
“The video was put together using interviews that I made last year with a US Army sergeant while he was waiting to return to duty for the second time in Iraq. Over the course of many days, he told me two different stories that I rearranged and spliced together in my work. The first account takes place in Bavaria and tells the story of a rendezvous with a German woman who is into driving fast and practices self-mutilation as a means for remembering. The second story takes place outside of Baghdad and is about a remote controlled bomb and a tragic error. These two stories were then put together in a script and interpreted by a group of actors in a series of immobile tableaux. As an installation, the work functions in pairs: interviewer and the person interviewed, memory and film, love and death, routine and accident.”
Omer Fast confronts the visitors to the exhibition with both politically relevant information and ideologically motivated formal conventions in film and television, along with the subjective dimension of perception and the communication of stories. Questions of “repression,” “desire,” and “pleasure” on both the side of those immediately involved in the events as well as the audience become entangled together. Here a situation unfolds beyond the differentiations between CNN and B-movies, documentation and fiction or reality and representation — leading the audience into an antagonistic terrain.
De grote Boodschap (The Grand Message) was shot in the Belgian town of Mechelen and presents overlapping but at the same time contradictory stories told by different Flemish couples who appear to be caught in a time warp. While some characters try to figure out what happened or just happened, others seem to systematically conspire to turn the camera and the other protagonists against them. The stories shifting between being serious and grotesque describe various digestive and excretory processes in both the figurative and literal sense.
Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972, studied in Boston and New York and has lived in Berlin since 2001.
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