Screening and Artist Talk - Omer Fast: 5,000 Feet Is the Best
Screening and Artist Talk: Omer Fast: 5,000 Feet Is the Best
Omer Fast’s film 5,000 Feet Is the Best (2011, 30 min.) could be seen as ‘a portrait of an exemplary human subject in the twenty-first century’. Traumatised, networked, dispersed — neither here nor there — and inextricable from the technologies through which he interfaces with the world, a retired military-drone pilot — a character assembled through documentary audio footage, video re-enactment and fictionalised drama —anchors the film’s depiction of a late-modern condition of un-deadness as chilling as it is compelling.
After the screening, Fast will discuss his film with novelist Tom McCarthy, co-curator of Holding Pattern.
Omer Fast
Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972. He holds a BA in English from Tufts University, a BFA in Visual Arts from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. Since finishing his studies in 2000, Fast has had one-person exhibitions at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2021), Times Art Museum in Guangzhou (2018), Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (2016), Jeu de Paume in Paris (2015) and Whitney Museum in New York (2010)
Group exhibitions include dOCUMENTA13, Venice Biennale in 2011. Fast received the Bucksbaum award for his work The Casting at the Whitney Biennial in 2008 and the National Galerie’s Prize for Young Art in Berlin in 2009 with his work Nostalgia. His work is in several international collections including Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum and the Centre Pompidou. Fast’s first feature film Remainder, an adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s novel, premiered at the Berlinale in 2016. His second feature film Abendland was released earlier this year.
Tom McCarthy
Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021.
McCarthy has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York and Städelschule Frankfurt. Since 2022 he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute New Mexico. In 2019 he guest-curated the exhibition Empty House of the Stare at London’s Whitechapel Gallery and in 2022 a major exhibition, Holding Pattern, in Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, responding to the art institute’s invitation to explore the themes and motifs of his work. The exhibition Holding Pattern will be on display at the HMKV Hartware MedienkunstVerein from 15 March to 27 July 2025. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.