Omer Fast
05 Oct 2007 - 20 Jan 2008
Omer Fast
The Casting
05.10.07–20.01.08
Opening: October 4, 2007–7.00 p.m.
How do experiences become memories and how do stories result from that? What form does their media dissemination take and how are they collected, selected, recorded and transmitted? Omer Fast’s artistic work is concerned with the status of experience and history in a society permeated through and through by media.
In his solo presentation in Vienna he is presenting two new video installations, The Casting and De Grote Boodschap that examine this aggregation of questions in various ways.
The basis of the multiple projection for The Casting is a series of interviews that Fast conducted with a sergeant in the US army before his renewed deployment in Iraq. Two of the stories told by the young man over a number of days were broken down by Fast and folded in one each other, clearly manipulated, staged as tableaux vivants by actors and then made into the subject of a film casting session. In the process what is created is a scenario well beyond any customary differentiation between CNN and a B-Movie, documentary and fiction. It leads the recipient into hostile territory: Omer Fast confronts visitors to the exhibition with politically relevant information and ideological conventions of representation in film and television as well as with the subjective dimensions of perceptions and transmission of stories and thus with questions of 'repression', 'desire' and 'enjoyment'.
De Grote Boodschap (The Great Message) presents the overlapping and simultaneously contradictory narratives of various Flemish couples that are caught in a time loop. Questions of ‘stomaching’, in both the psychological and literal sense of the word is accorded decisive meaning.
Curator
Matthias Michalka
The Casting
05.10.07–20.01.08
Opening: October 4, 2007–7.00 p.m.
How do experiences become memories and how do stories result from that? What form does their media dissemination take and how are they collected, selected, recorded and transmitted? Omer Fast’s artistic work is concerned with the status of experience and history in a society permeated through and through by media.
In his solo presentation in Vienna he is presenting two new video installations, The Casting and De Grote Boodschap that examine this aggregation of questions in various ways.
The basis of the multiple projection for The Casting is a series of interviews that Fast conducted with a sergeant in the US army before his renewed deployment in Iraq. Two of the stories told by the young man over a number of days were broken down by Fast and folded in one each other, clearly manipulated, staged as tableaux vivants by actors and then made into the subject of a film casting session. In the process what is created is a scenario well beyond any customary differentiation between CNN and a B-Movie, documentary and fiction. It leads the recipient into hostile territory: Omer Fast confronts visitors to the exhibition with politically relevant information and ideological conventions of representation in film and television as well as with the subjective dimensions of perceptions and transmission of stories and thus with questions of 'repression', 'desire' and 'enjoyment'.
De Grote Boodschap (The Great Message) presents the overlapping and simultaneously contradictory narratives of various Flemish couples that are caught in a time loop. Questions of ‘stomaching’, in both the psychological and literal sense of the word is accorded decisive meaning.
Curator
Matthias Michalka