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Omer Fast in "Fiction"Preview

August 13, 2014

In this preview from the Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 7 episode, Fiction, artist Omer Fast investigates the implications of identity as performance. Shown filming the work Everything That Rises Must Converge (2013) in Los Angeles, the artist recalls the influences of having been raised between two cultures and languages.

“If I feel authentic in one particular milieu but I switch milieu and I feel just as authentic in that other place,” questions the artist, “then what is that thing that we call identity about?”

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Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian

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Omer Fast’s multichannel video installations blur the boundaries between documentary, dramatization, and fantasy, frequently generating viewers’ confusion. 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.

“If I feel authentic in one particular milieu but I switch milieu and I feel just as authentic in that other place, then what is that thing that we call identity about?”

Omer Fast

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