In cooperation with the University of Zurich, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst hosts the video symposium Taking Measures: Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art. The international video symposium fosters a dialogue between art and research. Filmmakers, artists, researchers and scholars enter into creative and experimental conversation with each other about the usages and understandings of formats in film and video art.
In this Artist’s Talk, Omer Fast will focus on his new works A Place Which Is Ripe (2020) and Karla (2020). Both works are portraits of people working with web images that address the visual politics of violence. They show the disturbing effects that these images have on the human face as a site of identification and recognition. Much of Fast’s work delves into the psychology of contemporary trauma, often relying on the blurring of memory and the retelling of actual events through cinematic convention. His work moves beyond the formalities of the genre, pushing through reality and non-reality of his subject matter, and is ultimately about the status of the image as a tool to disseminate information, both real and manufactured.
Fast’s work has been exhibited extensively internationally and is included in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of American Art in New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Tate Modern, London, UK; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, among others. Fast lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Both videos can be watched online in full-length between February 3rd and February 5th, 2021 at Taking Measures: Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art. Please be advised that the films have sensitive content and are not suitable for persons under the age of 16.