Omer Fast, Production still from Nostalgia III, 2009
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At a moment when most art falls into the category of either eye-candy or eye-sore, Omer Fast’s newest film and video project, Nostalgia (2009), provides welcome relief with luscious imagery and a gripping structure that refuses to be pinned down. Ambitious, it features a short documentary-like video of Fast interviewing a Nigerian refugee, a longer two-channel reenactment of the interview and an even longer film departing from it. Each looped work builds upon the next to explore the fickle nature of power, especially vis-à-vis race: skin color wields tremendous power over how stories are told and, therefore, what history is written.

This theme is not new to Fast, but in this latest project he takes it on more pointedly than he has in past works, which have demonstrated Fast’s increasing skill at merging the seductive language of popular cinema with a non-linear narrative style. While Fast may be best known for Spielberg’s List (2003), a documentary-style video that cross-examines first-, second-, and third-hand accounts of the Holocaust, his more recent works have used various conceptual and formal strategies to play with narrative. Consider Take A Deep Breath (2009), which was featured recently at Postmasters Gallery. The video co-mingles a medic’s straightforward story about a bombing in a Jerusalem café with a dramatization of the events as they are filmed for a fictional video. Here, tension arises not from blood (as it does in the media), but out of conflicting accounts of the fictional shoot given by its cast members—a bossy assistant, a stoner cameramen, a struggling actress, an ethnically ambiguous bomber—as they jockey for power. Similarly, The Casting (2007), which won Fast the 2008 Whitney Biennial’s Bucksbaum Award, stood out for exposing the cracks in verbal and pictorial accounts by pitting a soldier’s stories against their enactment in cinematic tableaux.

Nostalgia’s three interrelated works allow Fast room to explore, with greater depth than ever before, the multiple ways that a single event can be experienced and the way that accounts of that experience may shift with each iteration. The central motif in this work is the trap—we all fall into and lay them, especially when it comes to race and other cultures. In Nostalgia I, a five-minute video playing on a flat screen at the gallery’s entrance, a Nigerian refugee explains in voice-over how to build the trap that helped him survive, while on-screen a white Westerner constructs the contraption. The difficulties of translation are even more apparent in Nostalgia II, a ten-minute, two-channel video in the next room. Here actors play the Nigerian refugee and white artist. The artist, who needs the refugee’s details for a film, comes off as alternately exasperated, well-meaning, condescending, and unable to understand the other’s cultural context. The refugee, desperate for work from the artist, seems guileless and duplicitous—a player who also gets played. The work’s structure intensifies their maneuvering for control: adjacent screens feature the same scene shot from each character’s perspective. Equally foregrounded, both men’s viewpoints vie for our attention. Nostalgia III, a thirty-minute film in the last room, further manipulates perspective. Here, in richly styled shots referencing the utopic/dystopic genres of 1970s science fiction and blaxploitation, Fast has once again swapped black for white: the refugees on the run are three white Brits fleeing their ruined country for a better life in an unnamed African country. The non-linear narrative jumps between scenes of the beleaguered trio trying to elude black soldiers patrolling their tunneled borders and the domestic lives of those in the relatively stable African country. In this topsy-turvy world where a black state fends off refugees from a white one, nobody is all good or all bad and everyone knows how to lay a trap.

If history had played out differently, black Africa might be dominating the white West, and Haiti might be sending rather than receiving aid. However, in the world we inhabit today, it takes a gesture of science fiction like Fast’s to conjure such an unimaginable scenario. With Nostalgia he vividly and effectively reverses the assumed skin-color equation, turning race into a trap that snares us all.

Kate Green is pursuing her Ph.D. in art history at The University of Texas at Austin.