A solo exhibition by Omer Fast opens on Friday, September 26, at 7 pm at Galerija Miroslav Kraljević. Omer Fast (born in Jerusalem in 1972 and living in Berlin) is one of the most prominent artists of his generation. His work has been exhibited widely, most recently at the last Berlin Biennial, Whitney biennial and the Manifesta 2008 and is included in collections such as the Whitney and Guggenheim museums in New York, MUMOK in Vienna, and Tate Modern in London.
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Galerija Miroslav Kraljević presents Omer Fast’s new 27-minute video The Great Message, in which the narration follows a series of everyday, but bizarre situations occurring among the tenants of an apartment building in Belgium: a flight attendant who returns home after an absurd occurrence on her last flight, an old woman who recalls the war, her caretaker in a post-coital conversation with her lover, and a secretive Arab who wants to rent the apartment in cash, six months in advance… Fast’s camera follows the characters like a hidden observer and the strange fragments of the story give hints of the possible answers and of a reading of the whole narrative, indicating above all that in a time of paranoia, of the construction of a “war against terror”, and of media manipulation, there is, it seems, no safety or peace even within one’s own four walls and especially not inside one’s head. Above all, in the video “The Big Message”, as in his other works, Fast questions the ways in which our reality and its interpretation are influenced by memory, the media, and pop culture. The video loop of “The Big Message” functions in the gallery setting as a nonlinear narrative labyrinth and, as opposed to the passive position of the film viewer, here the visitor is led to a broader perception and reflection and to the reading of a multitude of possible levels in the mysterious story.
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Preceding the opening of the exhibition at G-MK at 7 pm, the HDLU Club on Trg žrtava fašizma will host the artist talk by Omer Fast, in which he will present a selection of his works, dealing with a society manipulated by media and with the hyperproduction of the image, the (re)creation of history and of contemporary narratives, which lead the attention from a private to a global social and political perspective.
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G-MK programs curated by Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca
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Where is the door that leads to the heart of the message?
/ Ivana Bago & Antonia Majaca
In the outer room the two women knitted black wool feverishly. /Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”/
Among the first in the continuing line of “uncanny” and “fateful” images that Joseph Conrad used in his famous short novel Heart of Darkness is the one of the two women – one old and fat, the other young and slim, feverishly knitting black wool in the office lobby of a Belgium trading company, from where the novel’s protagonist, taking along its first readers, embarked on a journey into the yet unmapped territory – the heart of the dark and savage African continent. Almost 120 years later, Omer Fast’s video De Grote Bodschap (The Great Message) takes its viewers into “ordinary” living-rooms of contemporary Belgian citizens and their obviously repetitive, monotonous, utterly fateless and soap-opera-like lives, fragilely divided by the thin walls of a contemporary apartment building. In one of them we find sitting together on a couch what seem to be ghosts of Conrad’s foreboding knitters: an old, fatigued and absent-minded white lady and her caretaker – a young, attractive black woman whose job, among other things, implies locating and emptying the secret places where the old lady keeps the incredible variety of pills she drugs herself with on an everyday basis. Although Conrad never explicitly mentions it, the Darkness that the two knitters of black wool were “introducing” its passengers to was the Congo, the heart of the Belgian colonial empire, constituted in 1885 as the Congo Free State. In practice, the word free meant that at the time it was not (yet) officially a colony, but a privately run property of the Belgian king Leopold II, whose rule over the territory later became the epitome of colonialist exploitation and atrocities performed on the local population in the name of civilization, enlightenment and progress. Symbolically, the path from Conrad’s trading company office doors, introducing the pioneers of enlightened progress into the heart of primitive darkness, leads back in Fast’s video to the very source of light, the threshold of New Europe’s petit-bourgeois apartment blocks, whose adventurous explorers returned from the journey, leaving for posterity nothing but the burdening insight that the heart of darkness resided not in the heart of the Congo river but in the very European imperialist heart that has now become its collective and threatening subconscious. The young and attractive black woman in the video is a constant reminder of this past turned into an unbearable present, in which the old fatigued lady, Europe, can only numb herself into bearable indifference by swallowing pills, occasionally still dreaming of the good, but “uncanny”, times when her forefathers swallowed and defecated diamonds, their feces shining with the glow of the missions they were bringing them from. The old woman in the video is the sad remnant of this past, the true contours of which became obvious only many decades later, when the official history of colonialism as a one-dimensional fairy tale invented by its protagonists was shattered into pieces, leaving a bitter aftertaste for all who believed in it. All the characters that appear in Fast’s video, whose looped narrative evolves between three different and neighbouring “rooms” and their inhabitants, are victims of these unfinished histories, of the post-coital blues and the never-ending morning-afters of colonialism, domination, exploitation, capitalism, democracy, etc. whose plots have in the meantime become too entangled to be resolved by logic or reason. Attraction and repulsion are the two faces of the ghost pulsating behind the walls and peeking through the peephole: there beyond, the heart of the Heart of Darkness beats in the rhythm defined by tension between what is so irresistibly “there” and an impulse to escape it. The reality informed by such libidinous tension, in the midst of the unfinished and unreliable stories of the past and present, is slowly taking on the contours of horror-fiction, where everyone is constantly under the spell of invisible dark forces, waiting for the perfect moment when terror will strike – most probably exactly as you realize that your new neighbor is an Arab. Even when you dare to open the door and find out that the dark force is actually only a shit on your doorstep, as a true horror-drama hero, you will still be terrified. You’ll know only too well that no matter how much you clean it, it won’t go away.
