Theirry Bal/Courtesy GB Agency, Paris/Postmasters, New York/Arratia, Beer, Berlin

Omer Fast, "Nostalgia" (2009). Production still.

November 2009 Field Guide

The State of Things

Oleg Kulik

Robin Rhode and Leif Ove Andsnes

James Turrell

Bill Viola

Federico Fellini

Alfred Leslie

Omer Fast

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Known for his video installations, Omer Fast often borrows from and references popular film — employing, for example, some of Jack Foley’s pioneering sound effects or shooting the remaining sets from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) — to create arresting montages of sounds and images. In The Casting (2007), which was featured in last year’s Whitney Biennial, the Jerusalem-born, Berlin-based artist plays with the film convention of the voice-over, projecting images of actors arranged in tableaux onto two screens as a male voice says: "But I had met a German girl," with a close-up of a redheaded vixen in a dark club; "She would stand on the side of the road and blow us kisses and stuff," with a woman wrapped in a black burka waiting on a desert path; and "As we drive past," with a still of a military jeep. On the other side of the screens, Fast pulls the curtain away, so to speak, demystifying the narrator’s disembodied voice by showing two "hidden" projections of the head of a young American soldier answering questions posed by the artist. The crucial ties among time, space, and narrative become tangled as fact and fiction and, like memories, intertwine. For the South London Gallery exhibition, Fast continues his exploration of Hollywood and the themes of recollection, displacement, and loss in Nostalgia, a new three-part film installation that combines a man recounting his quest for asylum in Britain with a reenactment of his story as a 1970s science fiction movie in which he tries to escape from a dystopian Europe to a colony in Africa.

southlondongallery.org

"Omer Fast" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2009 Table of Contents.