Jan. 21, 2012 - Apr. 28, 2012
The exhibition includes a significant bulk of Fast’s current works focusing on documentary materials processed into fictional formats – interviews and closed-circuit videos, TV and movie genres, aerial photographs and unmanned satellite footage:
The Big Message (“De Grote Boodschap”, 27 min., 2007) presents a story in Flemish in a studio-apartment format reminiscent of TV sitcoms or situational dramas. The story shifts from a dying old woman and her World War II memories to her caregiver, who is also the girlfriend of the old woman’s grandson. The film moves between apartments and scenes – with some figures ignoring others sharing the same room, and others eavesdropping on the goings-on in other rooms, stories of war and inheritance, of Europeans and immigrants, Jews and Belgians, diamonds and excrement;
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Nostalgia (2009) is a three-part video installation that challenges the relation of fact and fiction on several levels. The three parts include a documentary clip as well as futuristic scenes presented in an old-fashioned retro set-up, a British refugee requesting asylum in Africa and a group of white refugees infiltrating Africa through a series of underground tunnels. The reversed movement of refugees (Europeans attempting to enter Africa illegally), the documentary material turned science fiction, and the retro-futuristic style of sci-fi, throw us out of balance creating a mechanism of displacement whereby the dramatization of realistic events allows viewers to review their understanding of reality itself;
5,000 Feet Is the Best (30 min., 2011) is Fast’s latest film and presents several interlapping interviews with an American unmanned drone plane pilot whose face is left blurred. Two storylines are woven into the interviews – in one figure of the interviewee fielding recurring questions from a therapist-journalist, and in another the stories of the pilot and the fictional figure are shown as fictional scenes in suburban Midwest USA. This overlapping of narrative and anti-narrative devices undoes the ties between text and image, creating for the viewer contesting new meanings that seek to re-evaluate everything, including the film itself.
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