Last Chance to See - Omer Fast's Nostalgia at the South London Gallery

Hooray! More video art for me to warble about.



Omer Fast's most famous work is CNN Concatenated (2002) for which he won the Bucksbawm award from New York's Whitney Museum. In CNN Concatenated, half of which you can see below (or above, stupid formatting...) Fast edited together shots of CNN newscasters to create a new scary-as-hell text. The film works like a heavily disjointed video essay. The seamless narratives of the groomed and impassive newscasters become distorted, and the distortions bring to light probing questions about the way in which we consume stories and newscasts. Ugh, every time I watch it it makes me start to feel a bit sick....

Nostalgia is a new three part video installation from Fast. It's showing at the South London Gallery until the end of the week, it won't make you feel sick (but it might make you cry) and if you read this before it's over then I would sincerely urge you to go!

The piece is installed in three adjoining rooms, each leading into the next. In the first room a single monitor shows a man demonstrating how to make an animal trap from bits of wood. Despite having both spoken instructions, and a visual demonstration, I still couldn't quite get my head around how this worked. Wouldn't it just fall over? how could you guarantee the animal would head towards this particular circle of ground? Why not just go to the shops? etc. etc. The voiceover described how the narrator (obviously better at woodwork - or hungrier- than I am) learned to make these traps from his father, who had briefly returned from fighting in an unnamed civil war. This bit was all very well, but a bit boring. What was cool though was the way the video looped, so you couldn't distinguish the beginning or the end. Just one long, looping instruction manual, until you decided to walk away.

In the second room was a piece being shown on two screens. A man whom I assumed to be narrator of the first film was interviewed by Omer Fast. The interviewer and the interviewee are shown on different screens, and occasionally whilst one person is speaking the other screen is blanked out. The interviewee, who is from Nigeria, comes across a lot better than Fast does, who seems a bit cocky and bossy. The interviewee is really cute and engaging, and super eager to be in Fast's film. The fact that he was once a child solder, forced to fight in a war that he didn't even understnd, doesn't seem to have got him down. Fast, on the other hand, is pretty morose.

I wasn't sure if the interview was scripted or not (the fact that the SLG newspaper contains a transcript of this section suggests that it is). Either way it's a wonderfully revealing piece of footage. In particular I enjoyed Fast's evident exasperation towards his subject. What's really clever is they way in which the dynamic that we see in the interview makes us reconsider the way in which we read the first film. Like in CNN... Fast makes us catch ourselves right in the middle of the act of consuming: just as we're swallowing the bait we catch sight of the metal hook buried within...

The final section of the piece is also the longest. Projected onto a cinema-size screen, the film depicts a dystopian alternate reality. Again, the pheasant trap recurs, but this time it's not described by an African asylum seeker but by a British man escaping from a war torn England. This bit isn't funny, and it looks a lot like a tv drama, possible starring people off the Bill. Having just seen the previous two films gives a wierd sort of 3D effect to the experience of watching the last one. It seems to be more true, by dint of having been more obviously fictionalised. Anway, in keeping with the majority of reviews on Cut out and Keep: I ended up in tears.

I loved the way that the new fictionalised narrative weaved in the tropes and ideas of the previous two films. Narrative gets a pretty rough time in cultural theory at the moment, but by combining fiction, interview and reconstruction, Fast managed to get the best of all possible worlds. Whilst as a whole the three-part piece interrogates the ethics of narrative, showing the sutures and ruptures from which even the most 'true' story is built, the same time on an individual level the final piece packs a powerful emotional punch. Ouch.

The show is wonderfully curated as well. I loved the darkness of the rooms and the interconnecting corridors. It felt like the placing of the films in three separate rooms had been designed to give us physical sense of the mental journey. Brilliantly, the only way out of the exhibition was to go back through the works to the first film at the entrance, emphasising the cyclical nature of the whole project.

If you live in London and can skip your Thursday or Friday off work then it's well worth heading to SLG for a look at an artist whose going to be big news in 2010. If not, keep your eyes peeled for future shows. I predict he'll be popping up all over the UK next year. If you get a chance to see his work, grab it. And bring the tissues. And a sick bag.