Omer Fast, still from "De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message)" (2007). High-definition video, 27 min.

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The Jerusalem-born, Berlin-based video artist Omer Fast is known for works that thoughtfully probe the way media affects our collective memory of past events and shapes our perception of reality. For example, the affecting Spielberg’s List (2003) features interviews with Polish extras from Schindler’s List (1993) about their memories of the Holocaust, presenting an account distilled through many filters, both truthful and fictitious. The Casting (2007), his knockout two-channel video, juxtaposes two separate anecdotes told by the same US Army sergeant (one about a disastrous experience with a German girlfriend, the other about accidentally shooting an innocent Iraqi), interweaving the two stories until they become indistinguishable from each other. His video De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message) (2007), recently on view at the MCA Denver, addresses racism as a nuanced, complex problem that has no easy diagnosis. Shot in Belgium, the 27-minute loop presents four scenarios set in different apartments seemingly in the same building. The narrative hinges on a dying elderly woman racked with World War II memories. Viewers see her white grandson earn multicultural points with his black girlfriend (also the grandmother’s caregiver) by condemning his grandmother’s xenophobia, then witness a caring exchange between the caregiver and the old woman that calls into question the young man’s perspective. Further complicating things is a scene showing the grandson’s own discomfort with the "other" when he nervously chats with a quiet Middle Eastern renter. It seems appropriate that this video screened in the city where Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination, since Obama’s now famous March 18, 2008, speech on race relations similarly provided an analysis that was hardly glib or judgmental. "Omer Fast" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.