Omer Fast

THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
by Emily Nathan



The measure of a translation has been its fidelity to an original, traditionally conceived as absolute and immovable. Jerusalem-born, Berlin-based video artist Omer Fast, whose 2005 video Godville is included in the 11-artist exhibition “Found in Translation” at the Guggenheim Museum, is known for his affecting short films that breathe new life into the familiar Postmodernist notion that the concrete and unambiguous original is in fact only a chimera, easily obscured or overwhelmed by versions of itself -- that is to say, by translations.

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