Remainder

Hit by a falling object in a freak accident, an unnamed man awakens from a coma with £8.5m in compensation and his memory gone. All that remains is a fragmentary image – a small boy at the top of a stairwell in an old house, reaching out his hand to an old lady on the floor below – which the man physically reconstructs in the hope of triggering a more complex memory. Using his wealth, the man acquires a block of apartments and populates it with actors to play out the scene again and again and again. But as scraps of other memories present themselves and the man becomes ever more desperate to reconnect to life, his re-enactments grow increasingly complicated and risky, leading him to an unsolved crime and the secret of his undoing.

Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972, and grew up in Jerusalem and New York. His multichannel video installations blur the boundaries between documentary, dramatization and fantasy. Fast often anchors his narratives with a conversation between two people – whether subjects recounting their own stories or actors playing roles of interviewer and interviewee. As dialogues escalate in tension, portraits of carefully calibrated identity emerge. Through repetition and reenactment, multiple takes of given scenes build shades of interpretation as a story is told, retold, and mythologized. Stories of origin, trauma, and desire mutate into one another, forming blended genres that confound expectations and disrupt narrative conventions. Projected into space or unfolding simultaneously on multiple screens, the work resonates with characters – whether a drone pilot, worker in the adult film industry, or a wife talking to her husband – who seem to express the elemental complications and disparities of their own identities. Omer Fast received a BA/BFA from Tufts University/ School of the Museum of Fine Arts (1995), and an MFA from Hunter College (2000). Among the honors he has received are the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst (2009); Bucksbaum Award (2008); and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Prize (2003). Major exhibitions of his work have appeared at the Rose Art Museum (2013); Imperial War Museum, London (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2013); Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal (2013); the Power Plant (2012); Dallas Museum of Art (2012); Wexner Center for the Arts (2012); Documenta (2012); Taipei Biennial (2012); Venice Biennale (2011); Singapore Biennial (2011); Cleveland Museum of Art (2010); Berkeley Art Museum (2009); Whitney Museum of American Art (2009); Indianapolis Museum of Art (2009); Performa (2009); Liverpool Biennial (2008); Whitney Biennial (2008, 2002); Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2007); Carnegie Museum (2005); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2004), and Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2003). Omer Fast lives and works in Berlin, Germany.