On March 18, “Present Continuous,” the first comprehensive exhibition in the UK dedicated to the work of Omer Fast, opens at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Spread across the two floors of the institution, the exhibition will include works both old — such as “Everything that Rises Must Converge” (2013), a multi-channel video that follows various members of the pornography industry through an entire day — and a new video called “Spring,” which, at the time of our conversation with Fast, was still a work in progress. In addition to the show, Fast has been busy rolling out his first feature film, “Remainder,” an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Tom McCarthy. The film, which premiered at the BFI Film Festival in October 2015, will have its North American premiere on March 21 at the prestigious New Directors/New Films festival in New York, where the artist will be on hand to present the work.In advance of the exhibition and his appearance in New York, Fast spoke with ARTINFO about the challenges of presenting new and old work together, the persistence of memory and repetition as themes in his videos, and why he is not giving up video and installation work for feature filmmaking.Presenting all your work in a large setting like this show, what are the challenges of putting old work together with new work?I haven’t had any opportunities, putting work up in such huge spaces. But the show is traveling from the Jeu de Paume in Paris, so it’s a more modestly sized scaled space. But we’re not starting from scratch. We’re in a sense adapting this show for the Baltic and that means that we’re altering the scale a little bit but we’re also adding in maybe two works that weren’t shown in Paris.When you’re putting something like this show together is it difficult to take a look at your old work that you haven’t looked at a while? I’m blessed and cursed with having the memory of your average fruit fly. So I don’t remember anything from two weeks ago. I certainly don’t remember work that I made two or three years ago, although we are showing a few of them. I do get reacquainted with some works, but I think that there is an understanding that we’re not yet in the realm of decades-long retrospectives. I’ve only been out of grad school for 15 years now. Regardless, I think that I’m certainly more interested in showing works that are newer than in going into the archives.In the process of putting a show like this together, are you noticing changes in your work over time? And are you surprised by those changes?Again, because I haven’t had an opportunity nor desire yet to really look at my work comparatively over time, I don’t have a very immediate and palpable sense of what that development has involved other than what I imagine or what I think it has. I would probably sort of divide that into two fields. One is more obvious and less interesting, and that is the technical development. I didn’t go to film school — I went to a graduate school that did not have a video camera or a computer. So a lot of the technical stuff I learned about producing, editing, and showing the work were things that were learned on the job as an artist rather than in advance. That is obviously to some extent the experience of many of my colleagues, but in my case the works do attest to a technical learning process and development, a greater fluency possibly in using media and moving images and storytelling, of course.Memory and repetition are things that appear in your work, often in different ways. I think the idea of repetition is for me fundamental to understanding the world and my engagement with the world. My experience with the world is always going to be one of imperfection. I’m a very flawed human being and the world is a very flawed world. In that sense… I do make work that at least begins, or has as a trigger, [with] events in the world — experiences, conversations with people. I do need to go out of the studio to begin my work very often. My notion of my work with regards to repetition is very often connected to this notion of repair, of correction, of, in a sense, creating a controllable analog model for understanding for what’s happening out there that is flawed and ambiguous and defies an easy answer of definition. So the notion of repetition is possibly close to what we think of, in a sense, both in scientific method of having a controllable and repeatable experiment, but with a perversion that sneaks in.When you mentioned the essential moment of exiting the studio it made me think of the use of interviews in your work. I think I do the interviews because a curiosity puts me out there. My day job, my life, is fairly boring. In order to supplement my life and to make my work more interesting to me I follow my interests, and these often lead to speaking with people whose lives or whose work I find interesting. Very often these are people, especially in several recent works, who have been involved with media, with this notion that part of their work is either taboo or invisible. Even though it has a massive influence on how we see and how we conduct ourselves as individuals and as a society. I’m thinking about, for example, the adult film performers that I spoke with and filmed for “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” and of course the operator of the predator drone for “5000 Feet is the Best” [2011]. Both belonged to industries that have a lot to do with what is visible and what is invisible, and with our notion of power. In the case of the drone, how American power is projected overseas and how media and technology is harnessed in order to extend that power. With pornography I think the notion of how media, power, and the visible and the invisible interplay is quite obvious.Can you talk about “Spring,” which is one of the new works you’re premiering at the BALTIC?It’s very difficult for me to do that because I’m still working on it. It literally is going to be finished for the exhibition, hopefully. But I can say that it’s a five-channel movie. It’s kind of anamorphic, so it’s divided into five screens that come together almost like pieces in a puzzle. Some are horizontal, some are vertical, but they are sandwiched together to form sometimes a single image and sometimes one, or two, or three of the quadrants will break off into their little tangents and begin to describe other aspects. So you may have a shot and a counter shot simultaneously; you might have two takes simultaneously; you might have more detail in a wider shot simultaneously. There’s quite a lot of play formally in the work with shots and with the images because it’s not a single screen. As far as content, it’s really difficult to say, but at the moment it’s a double portrait involving two young men, one a teenager and the other a bit older. Their paths sort of cross in the story and in the movie twice, quite violently. It extends what “Continuity” [2012] started, which is this exploration of loss and mourning and perverse, do-it-yourself therapy that this middle-aged couple is engaged in that have apparently lost their son.Are there limitations to installation work that you find solved by traditional cinematic production? I’m not very experienced in traditional film production. I only have one feature-length film to my credit at the moment and it was a long and rather painful birthing process. So I’m way more comfortable talking about the advantages and limitations of museum- or gallery-based work. This is where I come from and this is where I am. I find the gallery environment extremely free. The whole process is extremely free. You get the money, the budgets are relatively small — I often have to cobble together a couple of invitations in order to have the budget I need to produce the works that I want to make — but the amount of freedom is tremendous. The curator comes with the money and invitation and then they bugger off. They don’t bother you. And the way they work is shown is extremely open. You can do, of course, a more cinematic, black box pseudo-cinema. You can work with one screen or work with several. The notion that people come and go as they please is freeing. It’s more of a marketplace, an open space, and that allows me to play around with temporality, causality, things I’m interested in anyway. With specifically that people can drop in on a story at any time and possibly come up with different ideas of what they’re seeing. I like that. These are all great things about the art world allows me to do. The limits are of course that the budgets are relatively small and with regards to cinema, at least my experience, it is very seductive to create a little world and to create it with a degree of detail that a higher-budget afford you. And mind you, “Remainder” was a fairly small-budget movie. Nevertheless, compared to an artwork, which is often a one-night stand, a movie is a massive relationship. It’s a little world that you live in, and people who are there with you for the ride live with you, whether it’s the actors or the people on the team who are helping you produce it. As somebody interested in storytelling and the worlds each story involves, having a means to create that little world and be sucked into it is both seductive and dangerous.Was there something about Tom McCarthy’s novel that made you think of it more as something that needed to be produced in this context as opposed to a gallery or museum?I contacted Tom after reading “Remainder.” I didn’t know the book — it was recommended to me by a writer friend named Gideon Lewis Kraus. I read the book on an airplane and had a bit of a séance, a bit of a trip. I wanted to contact Tom to talk to him about the book and to possibly do something collaboratively for an artwork. When I got in touch with him, he said that’s all good, but the rights to “Remainder” have just been optioned. I didn’t call specifically about making a feature movie out of it. But what happened was Tom knew I was interested in doing something together, and possibly doing something with the book. He was familiar with my work and the company that had the rights to the book was trying to develop it along different lines. When they hit a dead end he told them about my work. I had a show at the time and they went to see it, and one thing led to another.What was it about the book that forced you into a séance? I think of the book as a portrait. And I think of myself, and maybe this is an easy answer, as a portraitist. I think of my works as portraits. And as a portrait I think the book was very compelling and had a lot to do with the portraits I was involved in making, of subjects who are very much involved in the operations of memory and are creating scenes that eventually consume them. That interplay between the scenes that you create and the world you inhabit, the degree to which authorship is involved in the formation of identity — these are all issues that “Remainder” stinks of. When I finished the book I felt extreme kinship with it. These are the obvious things that jumped out at me. Of course the ending of the book, the ploy that happens when the protagonist shifts his obsession with reenacting things into the real world, this is all just compelling for me. I bit into it.Working from a preexisting narrative, you make changes in your adaptation. Were you talking to McCarthy about those changes? Or did you want to keep a distance from him, to make the film as much of your own work as possible? Tom and I met after I got a go ahead to come up with a script for the movie. I met with him in Stockholm and we spent a very enjoyable weekend together staring at the wall. At some point we decided to put a piece of paper on the wall and we began to write down the names that appear in the book, the events, and their relationship and the ways they interconnect. It was a messy diagram that looks like a bad Mark Lombardi painting. I took that off the wall and folded it and went home to turn that into a script. I would have loved to continue to develop this with Tom, but he is a very smart guy and I think he for good reasons kept his distance from me [laughs]. I left alone, if one could call it alone when one is developing a script with a couple of people from different production companies.You mentioned the seduction of the process making “Remainder.” Is this something you want to continue?I have to worry about the present [laughs]. I’m very much involved in making art works and enjoy being an artist. I don’t see a development, per se, and my interests lead me wherever they do. I think ideally, of course, it would be wonderful to be able to live in both worlds. I don’t know at this point if that’s even possible given the very limited resources I have in terms of energy and brain time. I don’t know, so I think this is something that will have to develop organically.
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