Omer Fast: Nostalgia / MATRIX 230

Nostalgia

Nationality and migration, politics and international relations, history and collective memory—these are massive concepts that we often attempt to understand on the macro level of entire nations. But ultimately these grand themes and global situations are reduced to the relations between one person and another, operating within systems of social order and control created by others, but reinforced through individual actions. Nostalgia, a new three-part film installation by Omer Fast, treats the larger themes of governmental power, human control, territorial relations, and displacement through the singular narrative of a West African national seeking asylum in London.

The work uses this single story to provide a human-scale entry point into larger discussions, but the narrative is not straightforwardly adapted; rather, it is deployed across several shifts in filmic treatment. We begin with quasi-documentary excerpts from Fast’s initial conversation with the immigrant. Elements of this conversation are repeated in the second part, a staged film of the same interview with actors playing the part of filmmaker and subject. In the last part, Fast spins the story into a short narrative film, inverting racial and national roles and transposing the real experiences described in the interview onto a fictionalized tale of a dystopian Africa in which a British immigrant seeks asylum. The threads carried across the three parts complicate the relationship of past and present, fiction and truth, narrative and experience. Beyond the specificity of this one personal tale, the work meditates on storytelling, the relationship of identity to both place and memory. And, as with all of Fast’s work, the films are highly constructed, reflecting not only on specific subjects but also on the conventions of filmmaking itself, and its inherent potential for displacement, distortion, and manipulation.

Elizabeth Thomas
Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator

Nostalgia is coproduced by the South London Gallery; the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the Nationalgalerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin.

The MATRIX Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum is supported by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and the continued support of the BAM/PFA Trustees.