| Description |
The act of telling stories is one of our most longstanding traditions. Telling stories underpins social interaction. It allows us to communicate, to entertain, to pass on knowledge, to contextualise the world and to make sense of our place within it. Whether recounting the day or telling a tale of yesterday, it is still the traditions of narrative storytelling that so often bind us. Yet this invisible force has a lot more to answer for. Stories grow and make history which in turn formulates our sense of personal and cultural identity. Just as good stories are full of twists, turns, truths and fallacies, so too inevitably are the things that they make. It is this process especially, and the resultant existence of identity as a construction or a performance, that Omer Fast seeks to unravel.
Fast is, himself, a storyteller and uses the structures of narrative to feed and disrupt his films as they criss-cross through documentary, fiction, fantasy and realism, while maintaining a healthy measure of comedy. His single, projected images or multi-channel installations bring together accounts that may be real, may be made up, but always engage the viewer and lead to what one might call a productive uncertainty. Navigating a path through world politics, contemporary warfare, religion, sex and death, Fast shows us how our understanding of all these things, and much more besides, should be questioned, celebrating the slippery means through which they are all created.
This publication accompanies the largest exhibition of Fast’s work to date which has been organised as a collaboration between Jeu de Paume in Paris, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg.
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