Omer Fast

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,[8] 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,[9] a group of activists and others called out[10] the piece as racist “poverty porn” and demanded its removal. [11][12]

In 2015 Fast released his first feature film, based on the Tom McCarthy novel Remainder.[13]

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.[14]

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.[15] 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.[16]

In the four-channel video piece Casting,[17] the viewer walks into the screening room initially encountering two hanging projection screens. Each contains a different depiction of a narrative showing the characters acting while silent and remaining completely still. The projection screens are double-sided and contain two additional images on the rear side where the viewer sees two men engaged in an interview. The two men are a young American Army sergeant and the artist in a dialog about the narrative. The artist states during the interview that he is interested only in memory and how memory gets mediated; he says the work he is trying to achieve has or should have no political slant. Although the work is politically ambiguous it shows the powerlessness of an American Army sergeant in the current Iraqi conflict and possibly the powerlessness of perceived American hegemonic power.

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.[18] In preparation for his participation at the mentorship program Forecast, Fast produced a variation of CNN Concatenated to introduce himself as a mentor to potential mentees, reflecting on the challenge of communicating his expectations from a mentorship.[19]

The 59-minute two-channel work centers on interviews with residents of Krakow, Poland, who worked as extras in the concentration camp scenes in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List.[20] The video suggests that, whatever their experience, many conflated the Hollywood version of the Holocaust with historical reality.[21]

Fast's politically charged subject matter covers issues of race, pornography, and war—both historical battles and contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.[22]