Omer Fast. Present Continuous

Jeu de Paume invites you to visit “Present Continuous” with Omer Fast and curator Marina Vinyes Albes.

Omer Fast is above all a narrator. The way he constructs stories, showing great mastery of form, narrative forms and viewpoints, transcends his subjects. For while his works address social, political, geopolitical and historical issues, it is the mode of narration and its effects that make them so resonant. “[…] almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling, almost everything benefits information,” noted Walter Benjamin in 1936. And he added: “it is half the art of the storytelling to keep a story from explanation as one reproduces it.”

“Omer Fast. Present Continuous” proposes a progression which starts with a reflection on technology and the new forms of remote war in 5,000 Feet is the Best, shifts towards fiction and horror in the context of family life with Continuity (Diptych) and finally returns to historical reality as it is related by a television channel after 9/11 in CNN Concatenated. From the triggering of the “war on terror” to “virtual combat,” we see how our experience of the world is mediated by image technologies that are capable of making their impact on the subject ever more real, be that subject the television viewer or a drone pilot.

Screening at 7 pm in the Jeu de Paume auditorium with the artist, who will present “Talk Show” (2009, 65’, vo st fr).

Originally recorded live in front of an audience for Performa 09 in New York, “Talk Show” combines the familiar childhood game of Telephone with the confessional talk-show format. In a theatrical setting, invited guests recounted personal memories with direct links to current global events and the projection of power and freedom. While the guest talks, an actor listens on the stage and repeats the story from memory as soon as the guest is finished. While the first actor talks, another actor/actress arrives and listens to the story, also for the first time, and repeats what he/she heard, albeit from the actor. This repeats six times, allowing the audience to see how an individual’s first-hand memory is told and retold by a group of strangers. The unscripted story is transformed from individual memory to communal recitation, from an intimate story of tragedy into a comedy of sex and identity.

Exhibition tour and screening, free on presentation of exhibition ticket.