ART CITIES:N.York -Omer Fast
The multichannel video installations of Omer Fast blur the boundaries between documentary, dramatization, and fantasy, frequently generating viewers’ confusion. Omer Fast often anchors his narratives with a conversation between two people, whether subjects recounting their own stories or actors playing roles of interviewer and interviewee. As dialogues escalate in tension, portraits of carefully calibrated identity emerge. Through repetition and reenactment, multiple takes of given scenes build shades of interpretation as a story is told, retold, and mythologized.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: James Cohan Gallery
Omer Fast in his solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery features the New York premiere of three recent films, “5.000 Feet is the Best” (2011), “Continuity” (2012), and “Spring” (2016). The works in the exhibition each examine the shifting boundaries of modern conflict through the personal stories of those involved. The artist borrows from traditions of documentary, dramatization and fantasy, manipulating time through the use of repetition, looping, and reenactment to create new and complex structures. The protagonist in “5.000 Feet is the Best” is a Predator drone operator who for six years engaged with militants and civilians in Afghanistan from a US base in suburban Nevada. The film is based on two meetings recorded in a hotel in Las Vegas in September 2010, where the drone operator shared the technical aspects of his job with Omer Fast as well as the psychological difficulties he has experienced as a result of his work. “Continuity” is a film about loss and mourning. The central protagonist is a young German soldier named Daniel, returning home after serving in Afghanistan. A familiar domestic environment with emotional parents soon mutates to a series of theatrical scenes that gradually become perverse and uncanny. Daniel struggles to make sense of his increasingly alien home until his history, and ultimately that of his parents, becomes more and more tenuous. In his most recent work, “Spring”, Omer Fast returns and expands upon the narrative and relationships he created in “Continuity”. The story revolves around a teenage boy and an older male escort who are both engaged by the couple, Daniel’s parents, and whose paths cross violently on the streets of a wealthy German suburb. A portrait of family life in which roles are constantly shifting, Spring touches on issues of loss and recovery, drug addiction, small-town crime, and the portrayal of masculinity in an increasingly global economy.
Info: James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, New York, Duration: 25/3-7/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.jamescohan.com
