Omer Fast

Continuity features an older couple who hires male escorts to play out their dead son’s return from Afghanistan. The 40-minute work explores loss and grief as much as the narrative constructions of fiction and the cinematic conventions used in documentary films.

In 2017, Fast was met with protests and allegations of racism by the Chinatown Art Brigade and others in the Asian and Asian-American art community, including the Korean American artist and 47 Canal gallery owner Margaret Lee, for his August exhibition in the James Cohan gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The show was titled “August” after its centerpiece, a 3D video from 2016 inspired by the life of August Sander, a German portrait and documentary photographer. But that video, along with an earlier one, was upstaged by Fast's surrounding installation that transformed Cohan’s white-box space into a New York Chinatown shop or bus company waiting room with metal chairs, broken ATMs, and a shabby facade. Fast seemed to have intended the Cohan gallery “waiting room” not as a replication of any real Chinatown but as a version of immigrant neighborhoods evoked to justify “slum clearance.” While the Guardian wrote that the work was intended to provoke a strong reaction, a group of activists and others called out the piece as racist “poverty porn” and demanded its removal.

In 2015 Fast released his first feature film, based on the Tom McCarthy novel Remainder.

Fast's politically charged subject matter covers issues of race, pornography, and war—both historical battles and contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fast has had solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2012), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), Berkeley Art Museum (2009), Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2007), Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2005), Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2005), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2004), and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2003). His work has also been featured in dOCUMENTA (13) (2012) and biennials and group exhibitions. In 2016 the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin is showing the exhibition "Omer Fast. Talking is not always the solution". His work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally. In October 2015, a monographic exhibition of Fast’s work titled Present Continuous opened at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and subsequently travelled to the Baltic Center of Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, and the KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Le Caixa, Madrid, Spain; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, Poland; STUK Leuven, Belgium; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. His work was featured in dOCUMENTA (13), the 54th Venice Biennale, and the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennials. He received a BFA from Tufts University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Fast lives and works in Berlin.

Fast directed this short film shown at the Biennale di Venezia in 2011.

In October 2009, Fast’s exhibition "Nostalgia" opened at South London Gallery. The exhibition included Nostalgia, a three-part film installation that intermingles a man’s account of his struggle for asylum in Britain with a reenactment of his story as a 1970s science fiction movie in which he attempts to flee a dystopian Europe and relocate to a colony in Africa. Fast's 2009-2010 Nostalgia at the Whitney Museum of American Art received the 2008 Bucksbaum Award, given to the most prominent artist in that year's Whitney Biennial.

He was the recipient of the 2009 Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst and the 2008 Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Fast's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna.

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

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.

Omer Fast (born in Jerusalem, Israel 1972) is an Israeli video artist. He is represented by James Cohan Gallery and gb agency and lives in Berlin.