reviews omer fast
The Casting, 2007, production still. Photo: nicholas trikonis. courtesy the artist and arratia, Beer, Berlin
Omer FAst: the CAsting
arr atia, Beer, Berlin
27 octoBer – 30 novemBer
Omer Fast’s work analyses the way that individual and collective histories screens show two interviews between the artist and the sergeant. Fast has
are translated into the conventions of the moving image. By the same token, cut them into what appears to be a single conversation. Using individual
his often multichannel videos turn into precise descriptions of the processes words or similarly sounding passages as intersections between the different
that psychoanalysis sees at work in the structuring, storing, suppressing stories, the work suggests that the distressful event in Iraq might have been
and activation of memory. Fast co-opts the templates that the television covered by a screen memory. At the same time, the spatial arrangement
and movie industries employ in their representations of real events – the of the projections combines with the editing of the videos to frustrate the
eyewitness report, the reenactment, the footage of original sites – while at viewer’s attempts to disentangle individual narratives, and the suspension
the same time undermining this repertoire of supposed authenticity and of disbelief is negated.
credibility. Presented in a separate exhibition space, De Grote Boodschap
This is also true for his four-channel video The Casting (all works (2007) also leaves viewers puzzled as to the nature of the stories it evokes.
2007), one of two recent pieces on view at Arratia, Beer. The work’s The single-channel video is a loop of three episodes that seem to be
narrative overlaps and intertwines two dramatic events in the life of a interconnected: a young woman is in love with a man whose grandmother
US Army sergeant: the end of a rather unconventional relationship in she took care of; the young man tries to rent out his late grandmother’s
Germany and the traumatic incident of an accidental death in Iraq. Both apartment to a suspiciously behaving stranger; the neighbours worry about
stories culminate in a car ride – a girl speeding through a landscape, and the the goings-on next door. Moments of mistrust, guilt and dark secrets lace
soldier killing an innocent victim during a patrol. Fast presents these stories their conversations. What makes this work less unsettling than The Casting,
in a number of different media. He has some of the events restaged with however, is the fact that it presents an unstable narrative in a format that
such accuracy that we believe we are witnessing the actual events, while is already devised for the construction of fiction: the TV series. De Grote
others are performed by actors in a series of tableaux vivants, introducing Boodschap is without doubt a rich and precise work, yet Fast’s videos are
an element of estrangement. These scenes are projected onto the front best when they do many different things at once, when they deconstruct
of two screens that hang freely in the exhibition space. Only after one and reassemble complex stories and the ways they are inscribed into the
moves behind them is the source of the sound file revealed – the back mind. Astrid Mania
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