Omer Fast
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
New Media Gallery
July 22 – Opening reception Friday July 25, 6:00 pm
Omer Fast, De Grote Boodschap (The Great Message), 2007, looped HD video. Production still by Erik De Cnodder. Courtesy of the artist.
Omer Fast's "The Great Message" pulls you in like a magnet; the lush HD production and brooding close-ups of his lead characters are what initially draw you in, but it's simply impossible to wander away from the hypnotic pace of the personal narratives that the actors relate to the audience. As the camera pans through time across the walls of a Belgian apartment, Fast builds up a loosely connected mystery that becomes an epiphany once the viewer realizes the entire piece is an infinite loop, and after 30 minutes or so you're newly arrived at the familiar moment that brought you into the theater.
Every instant in the film seems strangely heightened and equally capable of ensnaring and then slowly engrossing the viewer, while the loop itself is much more than a clever motif, rather it turns the overall narrative into something greater than mere cinematic plot and makes the work's presence in a gallery or museum very appropriate: it's a work that needs to be contemplated on a level much deeper than the story, cinematography or performances alone.
On your next MCA jaunt, do plan on an extra 30 minutes to treat yourself to the entire experience of Fast's Great Message. And every moment makes for an appropriate entrance into the experience of the piece so don't hesitate to sit right down as soon as you arrive. (Be prepared to sit on the floor or bring/borrow a chair as the seating is limited to a single bench.) - KLH
Museum of Contemporary Art / Denver
1485 Delgany
Denver, CO 80202
303.298.7554
Mon: Closed
Tue–Thu: 10:00–6:00 pm
Fri: 10:00–10:00 pm
Sat-Sun: 10:00–6:00 pm
http://mcadenver.org
MCA DENVER PRESENTS DE GROTE BOODSCHAP (THE GREAT MESSAGE) BY OMER FAST
IN THE NEW MEDIA GALLERY
DENVER, July 19, 2008 - The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver proudly announces Omer
Fast in the New Media Gallery, curated by Cydney Payton, Executive Director and Chief Curator
of MCA DENVER. This exhibition features De Grote Boodschap (The Great Message), a looped
HD video filmed in 2007 in the Belgian town of Mechelen. The exhibition opens July 22, 2008
and runs through January 4, 2009. A public reception featuring the artist will be held on Friday,
July 25 from 6-10pm.
De Grote Boodschap (The Great Message) introduces us to the interweaving stories of a
stewardess and her unemployed husband, an old junkie and her caregiver, a former beatboxer
and his girlfriend, a real-estate agent and a taciturn Arab. In this - as in his other works - Omer
Fast addresses the question of how our realities and their narratives are influenced by memory,
the media and pop culture.
"Part of the ethical experience of watching one of Fast's works is discovering the ways in which
we have assumed a subject to be too simply a representative of history. Fast warns us that
people are too robust to be treated as historical categories, too various to be treated lightly.
People are at the same time more than the stories history tells about them... and more than the
stories that they have become trapped into telling about themselves... Fast says that "people
are traps for history," but history is also a trap for people. Fast's works free his characters from
the stories that have trapped them, enabling their details and their gestures to tell other
stories." ~Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "The Reanimator, Omer Fast's Virtual Realities", Nextbook, April
30, 2008
Omer Fast was born in 1972 in Jerusalem. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He holds a
BA/BFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA and an MFA from
Hunter of the City University of New York, NY. Selected exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney
Biennial Exhibition, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern
Art, Vienna, Austria and Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA. Upcoming exhibitions are planned at
Tate Modern, London, UK and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Omer Fast
is the winner of this year's Bucksbaum Award, the largest award given to an individual visual
artist, presented to an artist who is shown in the Whitney Biennial.
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