Omer Fast

Omer Fast is a foremost video artist on the contemporary international scene. His productions documentalize fiction, introducing subjectivity and real-life experience into ambiguous settings. How does he construct these stories? How does memory affect the act of constructing a narrative? The work of Omer Fast often uses the interview format as a strategy for looking at reality, though its aim is to establish not the veracity of facts, but the truth that emerges from the narratives and representations. The artist draws on real-life stories of people who explain their experiences, but questioning their reality or authenticity. He manipulates characters and switches scenes, and the stories come to life, acquire new sequences or are recomposed in different forms. The resulting narrative, despite being complete fiction, is constructed with the words and gestures of the original narrator, which serve to anchor them in the real world.

Omer Fast was born in Jerusalemin 1972, lived in the United States and is now resident inBerlin. He studied at Tufts University (Boston) and received his MFA from Hunter College( New York). He has received prestigious awards from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2009) and the Whitney Museum of American Art inNew York(2008). Recently his work has gone on show at, among other places, the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Baselland Kunsthaus in Basel, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, the Guggenheim in New York, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Venice Biennale and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.