Omer Fast

Omer Fast (born 1972) is a contemporary video artist. He lives and works in Berlin.

Born and raised in Israel, Fast spent much of his teenage years in Jericho, New York while his father pursued a medical degree in both countries. He received his BFA from a dual-degree program at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1995, majoring in English and painting, and an MFA from Hunter College in 2000. He subsequently got a job doing magazine layout, then met his wife, German designer Anuschka Hoevener, who was studying fashion in New York. He followed her to Berlin.

Fast is one of several artists involved with restaging existing films, including Pierre Huyghe, Robert Melee and Yasumasa Morimura.

In 2002, Fast released CNN Concatenated, an 18-minute-long single-channel video which uses CNN footage. The video is cut so that each word is spoken by a different newsperson. The pieces literally asks the viewers questions about media authenticity and give CNN a distinct voice.

The 59-minute two-channel work centers on interviews with residents of Krakow, Poland, who worked as extras in the concentration camp scenes in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List. The video suggests that, whatever their experience, many of them conflated the Hollywood version of the Holocaust with historical reality.

In the four-channel video piece Casting, the viewer walks into the screening room initially encountering two hanging projection screens. Each screen contains a different depiction of a narrative showing the characters acting while silent and remaining completely still. The projection screens are double sided and contain two additional images on the rear side where the viewer sees two men engaged in an interview. The two men are a young American Army sergeant and the artist in a dialog about the narrative. The artist states during the interview that he is interested only in memory and how memory gets mediated; he says the work he is trying to achieve has or should have no political slant. Although the work is politically ambiguous it shows the powerlessness of an American Army sergeant in the current Iraqi conflict and possibly the powerlessness of perceived American hegemonic power.

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