O mer Fa st 07 September-23 October 2005 at inIVA In his first UK exhibition, Godville is constructed from interviews with eighteenth-century characters – interpreters in Colonial Williamsburg, a living-history museum in Virginia, USA. The piece presents portraits from a town somewhere in America unmoored and floating between the past and the present.

The Institute of International Visual Arts For further information please contact: (inIVA) is a contemporary arts organisation promoting artists from diverse cultural inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts) backgrounds through exhibitions, 6-8 Standard Place, Rivington Street publications, research and educational EC2A 3BE, United Kingdom ventures. inIVA has a special interest in new Tel.: +44 20 7729 9616 technologies, international collaborations Fax: +44 20 7729 9509 and commissioning site-specific artworks. Email: [email protected] Wednesday–Saturday, 7 September – 23 www.iniva.org October 2005, 12.00–6.00pm and Sunday 18 September & 23 October Registered Charity no. 1031721 2005, 12.00–6.00pm Admission free

Opposite: Omer Fast, Godville, production still (Detail), 2004 Education Curated by Nadia Fischer 20 June – 20 July In Media Res: Information, Whitechapel, London Review Postmasters (Review), Flash and Katja Garcia Anton, 13 Facing Footage, Two-Person Contre-Information, Galerie of Books, vol.27, 6 January Art, May/June 2003 MFA, Hunter College of the June – 16 September Exhibition (with Jeanne Faust) Art & Essai, Universite 2005 Roberta Smith, Art in Review: City University of New York, (catalogue) Pinakothek der Moderne, Rennes, France (catalogue) Simon Gould, Voluntary Omer Fast (Review), New 2000 The Imaginary Number, Munich, 19 May – 4 July 14 May – 21 June Memory: Imagining the York Times, 18 April 2003 Kunstwerke, Storytelling, George Eastman Contemporary Art/Recent Invisible Past, Contemporary, Peter Schjeldahl, Goings on Curated by Anselm Franke House, Rochester, New York Acquisitions, Jewish issue 70, December 2004 about Town: Omer Fast at Selected Solo Shows and Hila Peleg, 4 June – 11 14 May – 4 July Museum, New York Omar Calderon, Christine Postmasters, New Yorker, Oct 2005 September (catalogue) Ars Viva 03/04, Frankfurter 11 April – 27 July Calderon, Peter Dorsey, eds, 21–28 April 2003 Postmasters Gallery, New Covering the Real, Museum Kunstverein, Frankfurt, 27 [based upon] True Stories, Beyond Form: Architecture David Deitcher, Get Real: Two York of Fine Arts, Basel January – 14 March [title correct?] Witte de With, and Art in the Space of contemporary Israeli artists 15 September – 15 October Curated by Hartwig Fischer, 1 Video X, Momenta Art, Rotterdam Media, Lusitania Press, New subvert the documentary The Institute of International May – 21 August (catalogue) Brooklyn Curated by York, 2004 tradition (Review), Time Out Visual Arts, London Reprocessing Reality, 23 January – 23 February and Jean-Pierre Rehm, 23 Omer Fast (Review), New York, 10–17 April 2003 7 September – 23 October Château de Nyon, Visions du January – 30 March Contemporary Visual Arts, Régis Durand, (based upon) Midway Contemporary, Réel, Nyon 2003 Pol.i.tick, Williams College No.61, March 2004 true stories, Art Press, April Minneapolis, Minnesota Curated by Claudia Spinelli, Works from the Collection, Museum of Art, Omer Fast au Centre national 2003 14 May – 25 June (catalogue) 17 April – 17 May (catalogue) Museum of Contemporary Massachusetts de la Photographie, Les Silvia Rottenberg, [Based Fair Use: Appropriation in Art, Basel Curated by Lisa Dorin, 18 Inrockutibles, Upon] True Stories (Review), 2004 Recent Film and Video, Curated by Philipp Kaiser, January – 29 June February–March 2004 De Witte Raaf, No.102, National Centre of Hammer Museum, UCLA, December – March 2004 Think Big, Saidye Bronfman Sandra Danicke, Was wahr March–April 2003 Photography, Los Angeles Film in der Kunst: Omer Fast Centre for the Arts, sein könnte, Frankfurter Silke Hohmann, Wenn ich 25 February – 22 March Curated by Matthew and Jeanne Faust, Curated by Cate Rimmer, 7 Rundschau, 4 February 2004 Soldat bin (Review), Thompson, 1 March – 29 Brandenburgischer November 2002 – 5 January Konstanze Crüwell, Eine Frankfurter Rundschau, 19 2003 May Kunstverein, Potsdam Nagelschere für den February 2003 Centre for Contemporary Art, Life: Once More, Witte de (catalogue) 2002 Vorgarten, Frankfurter Christoph Schütte, Blick aus Fribourg, Switzerland With, Rotterdam 2 October – 12 November Monitor: Video 2, Gagosian Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 dem Panzer (Review), 4 July – 16 September Curated by Sven Lütticken, Incommunicado, Hayward Gallery, New York January 2004 Frankfurter Allgemeine Postmasters Gallery, New 27 January – 27 March Gallery National Touring 25 June – 9 August Felicity Lunn, Fiction or Zeitung, 18 February 2003 York (catalogue) Exhibition: While U Wait, MOT, London Reality (Review), Artforum, Jennifer Allen, A Tank 22 March – 26 April Sainsbury Centre for Visual 14 June – 7 July December 2003 Translated, catalogue, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2004 Arts, Norwich, UK (catalogue) Here and Now, Büro Jennifer Ostrower, Omer Fast Insideout, Fifth Festival of Frankfurt Faces in the Crowd, 30 September – 14 Friedrich, Berlin at Postmasters (Review), Art Contemporary Art, Berlin, 4 February – 23 February Whitechapel Art Gallery, December 18 May – 28 July in America, October 2003 2002 London Travels to Cornerhouse, Submerge, New art from New Brigitte Weingart and Jennifer Charlotte Laupard, Think Fast 2002 Curated by Carolyn Christov Manchester, 21 May – 11 July York, Kunstbunker Nürnberg, Allen, Facing Footage – Film (Review), Technikart (Paris), &: gb Agency, Paris Bakargiev, 3 December – 28 Gestes d’attention, Nuremberg, Germany, in Art, issue 64, July–August, 2002 (catalogue) February 2005 Printemps de Septembre, Curated by Eva Scharrer, 11 Catalogue published for the Emmanuelle Lequeux, Omer 1 June – 15 July Travels to Castello di Rivoli, Toulouse (catalogue) April – 5 May three exhibitions Fast, Citoyen d’un Monde qui Turin, 4 April - 10 July 2005 Curated by Marta Gili, 26 Biennial 2002, Whitney accompanying the Ars Viva Cloche, Le Monde (Aden), 19 2005 (catalogue) September – 19 October Museum of American Art, award, October 2003 June 2002 Selected Group Shows Pickup, Public, Paris Hidden in Daylight, Foksal New York Anke Kempkes, Hidden in Judicäel Lavrador, with 2005 Curated by Guillaume Gallery Foundation in Curated by Lawrence Rinder, Daylight, Frieze, No.78, introduction by Tracy Adler, Mixed Doubles: Nam June Désanges, 26 November – 19 collaboration with 3rd Annual 7 March – 26 May (catalogue) October 2003 Omer Fast: I wanna tell you Paik and Omer Fast, Carnegie December 2004 Film Festival, Cieszyn, Poland Second Site, Alumni Jennifer Allen, Openings: something, catalogue, Museum, Pittsburgh Voluntary Memory, Austrian Curated by Joanna Exhibition, Hunter College Omer Fast, Artforum, published by &: gb Agency, Curated by Elizabeth Cultural Forum, London Mytkowska, Andrzej MFA Gallery, New York September 2003 Paris, 2002 Thomas, 16 August – 9 Curated by Alona Pardo, 19 Przywara, Adam Szymczyk, Curated by Lynn Sullivan, 27 Chris Chang, Vision: Omer Holland Cotter, Never Mind October November – 19 December 17 July – 27 July February – 20 April Fast, Film Comment, the Art Police, These Six CUT/Film as Found Object, Rear View Mirror, Kettle’s Kaap Helder, 2003, Kunst en (catalogue) July/August 2003 Matter, New York Times, 5 Milwaukee Art Museum Yard, Cambridge, UK Cultuur Noord-Holland, Den Brian Boucher, History, May 2002 Curated by Stefano Basilico, Curated by Elizabeth Fisher, Helder, Holland (catalogue) Memory, Fiction: Omer Fast Biennial 2002, Whitney 25 June – 25 September 18 September – 7 November Curated by Peter de Rooden Selected Bibliography at Postmasters, Museum of American Art (catalogue) Busan Biennale (Moving and Nathalie Zonnenberg, 6 Ulrich Gutmair, Macht nur published online at (catalogue), New York, 2002 Travels from Museum of Picture Desire), Busan, Korea June – 3 August soviel Ihr Könnt, Netzeitung, 2 bbs.thing.net, May 2003 Holland Cotter, Art in Review: Contemporary Art, Miami (catalogue) Arcadia, Govett-Brewster Art August 2005 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Second Site (Review), New 13 November 2004 – 30 21 August – 31 October Gallery, New Plymouth, New Mary Abbe, Below the Radar, Cream 3: Contemporary Art York Times, 21 March 2002 January A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Zealand Star Tribune, Minneapolis, 27 in Culture, Phaidon Press, Prague Biennale, Second Postmasters Gallery, New Curated by Hanna Scott, 10 May 2005 London, 2003 Sight York May – 20 July, Peter Campbell, At the Rachel Stevens, Omer Fast at the case of Godville, the viewer’s reading of called ‘fast-food ancestor worship’. the work is continuously jarred by the slippage between past and present: the character- During the shooting of Godville, I interpreters slip seamlessly between the deliberately tried to engage the two colonial past of Williamsburg and centuries that converge in Colonial contemporary reality. Willamsburg. In the beginning of each interview, I spoke to the performers as an OF: A part of what makes a time machine ideal visitor would. I asked them about the like Colonial Williamsburg work is the town they live in, what’s going on around mutual consent it requires. The performer them, their 18th-century life. At some point puts on a costume, emulates an accent though, I stopped the illusion and started and deliberately forgets the last two asking some of the same questions out-of- hundred years whenever a visitor is around. character. As expected, a strategy of this The visitor also participates by stepping sort can sometimes be interesting or into the time and space of the performer, revealing, sometimes it just seems not only activating the machine through contrived. In any event, what I ended up his/her presence but by talking and asking with was a double portrait of one person, questions, steering the conversation, often speaking about his or her life in two having to speak and behave in a way the centuries. Back in the studio, I decided to character being portrayed would use the material indiscriminately. Instead of understand. This isn’t just about sorting out the illusion of the historical interactivity though. What’s more interesting character being performed from the reality is what happens to reality in the process. of the contemporary person performing, I Both performer and visitor are complicit in used the entire interview as an inventory maintaining the illusion created between which could be freely adapted. This means them. At the same time, both are also not only jumping between historical time Omer Fast aware of the present and the impossibility and the present, but in a literal sense, of fully escaping from it. They might choose jumping around the interview: cutting in conversation with Gilane Tawadros, not to acknowledge it, but the present is together entire statements, chopping and always there, within reach, just on the mixing sentences, even editing together Director, inIVA periphery of their dialogue. It’s the measure words never spoken during the interview against which anything said between them from consonants and vowels. It also means is tested. Like a memory, it can be referred not only dissolving the two personalities of to, repressed or recovered through a game the interviewee into a hybrid, but eventually GILANE TAWADROS: What inspired you to practical to fly over and hope for of avoidance, allusions and double also blurring the distinction between myself make your new video piece Godville? spontaneous cooperation. Also, the longer entendres. How much something like this and that person, between what I want to the military occupation of Iraq was happens depends of course on the pull out of the interview and what was OMER FAST: I think I was looking for a continuing, the less interested I’d become persons involved. One performer told me actually said. Sometimes the characters go place that could simultaneously connect in representing combat, especially as it is he uses his 18th-century character, an on long tirades, accusing me (or the viewer) some pretty disparate, admittedly vague, performed by people in drag shooting avowed subject of King George who is of hypocrisy, of personal failing, of left- interests I have: historical representation blank bullets at each other on weekends. In nevertheless beginning to find fault with His leaning prejudice, of turning them into and time travel, theme parks and suburbs, retrospect, this might have actually turned Majesty’s policies, to make a point about clichés. None of this was said in the war and the media, split personalities and up something interesting, but soon after I what he sees around him today, where interviews, but the narratives are edited as hybrids, tourism and tourists, performance was more drawn to living-history museums, being a patriot increasingly means not smoothly as possible so that they’re and acting, America and Americana. I where I hoped to find people who were being critical. He portrays his character, a convincingly fluent. It is only by seeing how started by contacting re-enactment groups. somehow in a more advanced, if less ‘founding father’ and signer of the the person speaking is edited that the These are people who meet on a regular ecstatic, state of deliberate disorientation. Declaration of Independence, not as the proper sense of time (and order) is basis in order to rehearse or perform a After a period of correspondence, followed maverick revolutionary he believes the restored, albeit one that is artificial and historical event, usually a battle of some by visits and meetings, I was rejected by visitors were taught to expect, but as a fractured. sort, according to historical record and in the first three places in the northeast. The British subject struggling to define his period dress. I was hoping to join them as fourth and biggest of all, Colonial duties and rights within the framework of an unofficial observer or to complete the Williamsburg in Virginia, generously agreed. citizenship. This particular performer tries to GT: The idea of the time machine is a very tableau by participating as a war re- avoid escapism and deliberately alludes to interesting one. It is a long-standing theme of enactment photographer. I wrote to several GT: Can you say a little more about this ‘state contemporary issues when re-enacting the science fiction from TV programmes like and was roundly rejected. Still, I prefer to of deliberate disorientation’? This seems to be past with his guest. At other times, if either Doctor Who to films like Back to the Future. do these things with permission. a continuous theme in your work. The viewer party is just looking for a spectacle, the The fantasy is that we can travel in time and is repeatedly made disorientated by the same interaction just leads to a know definitively what it was like. Yet, knowing Since I had not lived in the States for disjuncture between what he/she sees on the pornography of the past, an affirmation of the past in that pure and authentic way is almost three years at the time, it was not screen and the text or voiceover on the film. In the present, or what that same performer impossible and probably less important than during the shooting of Schindler’s List in Eventually, instead of sorting through the 1993. Some of them were old enough to details and separating fact from film, I have also experienced the events depicted decided to pass the responsibility along to in the movie earlier on in their lives. Others the viewer. In Godville, on the other hand, just speak vividly about something that is the difference between re-enactment and very real but is nevertheless a kind of a life is suppressed and the two are literally copy. The difference between their mixed into a whole. The erosion in its recollections is repressed though, and the characters’ credibility, their loss of historical work inconspicuously cuts between these perspective, is not presented so much as a persons’ first-hand experiences: between loss per se, nor as a challenge to sort memories that were lived through and through. It is presented as something memories produced by the cinema. The intoxicating, especially in the work’s most presence of the movie-event as a kind of direct moments, when the characters public archive that both complements and become self-aware and lash out but their corrupts the individual memory is therefore speech is totally artificial. a theme that runs through this work. I started working on Godville a year after Despite all this, the two works clearly have finishing Spielberg’s List. a lot in common. Both look into the past through the perspective of persons who The two videos are obviously closely participate in its re-enactment. Both rely on related. Still, for me, there are a few these persons’ experience and report from significant differences. To begin with, a first-hand point of view. Coming back to Godville doesn’t revolve around an ‘event,’ the time machine though, both works also be it historical or cinematic. Its setting is misuse their subjects and derail in their bid both broader and reaches farther back in to get at the past. I don’t think that either time than Spielberg’s List does. More work could be characterised as critique. I explicitly put, Godville’s historical context like to think of them more as portraits. They does not immediately hark back to a are portraits whose subjects are obviously singular trauma. This allows the performers, splintered. They are also portraits in a at least the ones doing the white modernist sense in that they foreground the characters, more latitude to be ‘normal’ – surface and erode the distinction between to be more anonymous and paradoxically artist and sitter. In that sense, they’re self- Above: Omer Fast, Godville, film stills, 2004 even more contemporary – than the portraits. Spielberg/Schindler survivors ever could. I understanding how our past shapes present (or isn’t allowed) to make sense of the loss tried to exploit this by editing much more of realities and how we could use that in a contemporary context and the the present into Godville and the work knowledge productively. Is this your view? emotional moment appears almost quaint seems, at first perhaps, to be looser and and drawn out compared with the bursts of more immediate. The second main OF: Of course. Having said that, I think my fragments that follow. These kinds of real- difference is that Godville doesn’t mourn work reflects a notion of time that is not so life parallels don’t usually happen to me but the blurring of re-enactment and life the fixed or stable. It’s more about describing I remember editing this woman’s segment way Spielberg’s List does. Somehow, I this instability, trying to find ways of at a time when there was a debate over think this difference stems from the articulating it, than prescribing a way of publishing the images of American coffins languages spoken in the two works. Even dealing with it. To the persons who appear coming back from Iraq. though I heard quite a bit of Polish early in in my work, or rather in the narratives that I life, I had to rely on a translator throughout make out of them, this lack of determinacy my stay in Krakow. The more interviews we is a source of both pleasure and pain. In GT: Your work makes us self-conscious of our did together, the more sensitive I became Godville, for example, there is a long deep-seated desire to sustain this illusion that to the role of this person. The dependency unedited segment in which a woman we can suspend the present and enter the on a third party was often a rich source of recalls the loss of three of her sons. All past. I’m thinking here about other of your frustration for me, but it also allowed for a three died in the War of Independence, works like Spielberg’s List. Could you say certain distance from the people I over two hundred years ago. They are something about the relationship between interviewed and from their weird stories. actually the sons of her character. Still, this Godville and Spielberg’s List? Among other recollection appears to be the least things, are these works a critique of ‘fast-food This distance was useful in forestalling any manipulated, most credible part of her ancestor worship’ and is this exclusively an reaction to what they were saying: I only narrative. She cries, wipes her eyes and the American past time? had access to their body language, to their editing starts whirling around her again, act of remembering. Only after a pause bringing back the present tense, along with OF: For Spielberg’s List, I interviewed and the ensuing translation would the doubt and denial. In the end, she is unable people in Krakow who worked as extras content arrive, with all its contradictions.