Born in Jerusalem and based in Berlin, Omer Fast is one of the most innovative video artists working today. Using familiar sources of reference, Fast manipulates time, memory and location with a multi-layered elegance, which is both subtle and humorous.

The print Richard was produced with Iniva when Fast was part of inIVA’s Atlas season of exhibitions and events that map ideas and experiences largely drawn from uncharted territory in 2004.

The print includes a still and text from Fast’s film Godville in which he interviews 18th-century character interpreters in Colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum in Virginia, USA. The characters in Godville represent a cross-section of the town’s resident reenactors interviewed in their assigned eighteenth-century settings and period garments and the film tells the story of a town whose residents are unmoored and floating somewhere in between America’s past and present, fantasy and reality.

The composition of the print mimicks his playful editing process of cutting and arranging scraps of text to create new frissons within language.

Omer Fast is pre-occupied with the way conventional documentary approaches misrepresent and distort history. His ruminations have a multilayered elegance that is subtle, humorous, and continuously overlapping between time, memory and location.