Realised for dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, Continuity’s new edit, with an additional 30 minutes of footage, is the story of Daniel, a young German soldier returning home from Afghanistan. His parents welcome him, but the first few hours of refound family unity soon give way to a disquieting disorientation. The camera insists on details and domestic rituals without the usual emotional load, which opens the curtain on a story that covers up the expectations, expanding the content of the film from the drama of a veteran to the existential desert of a typical German middle class family. Fast experiments with the deconstruction of the traditional narrative arc, staging again the repetition of a loop, its peculiar stylistic feature, which deprives the viewer of the usual references, forcing him to give up the idea that there is a goal to achieve in the story. The consequential events and the consequent possibility of prediction of the plot stand in stark contrast to the surreal raids that wind and twist throughout the film. The latter, in fact, draw multiple narrative paths that constitute the backbone of a film that has all the flavor of psychodrama.

 

Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972 and grew up in Israel and New York. He currently lives and works in Berlin. His solo shows were exposed at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna (2007), at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2008), the Dallas Museum of Art (2012) ande the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2014). He appeared at the Venice Biennale (2011) and dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012) and among the honors he has received are the Bucksbaum Award for The Casting at the Whitney Biennial, New York, in 2008 and the National Gallery in Berlin awarded him the Young Art prize in 2009 for his film Nostalgia. His works are present in many international collections, including Tate Modern in London, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.