"Five Thousand Feet is the Best" 2011
"Her Face was Covered (Part I)" 2011
"Her Face was Covered (Part II)" 2011
Photo by Keizo Kioku

TARO NASU is pleased to present the first solo show by Omer Fast.

Omer Fast
1972 born in Jerusalem, Israel.
Lives and works in Berlin.

This first solo exhibition in Japan consists of 2 video works, having a common them, drone.

It is said that the tactic of using drones for assassinations was developed by Israel and continued by the US. Fast once told about drones as “Being endowed with these superhuman powers of perception, of surveillance, of being able to control someone’s life, being able to be that proberbial ‘fly on the wall'”*1. But on the other hand, he indicstes that there are traumatic experiences of the drone pilots, even though they are not in the battlefields physically and perfectly safe. Fast is trying to indicate the inherent contradiction of today, in his words, “the contradiction in being there and not being there”.

5,000 feet is the Best

The video is based on the interviews with a drone pilot which was recorded in a hotel in Las Vegas in 2010. In this work, the interview scenes are repeated several times with the same casts, but each time the story differs slightly, revealing the drone operator’s mental suffering. Through the unique and ingenious presentation of intentional “repetition” and “difference”, Fast blurs the border of fiction and reality, attracting the viewers to the endless loop of his unfinished story.

Her Face Was Covered (part 1/ part 2)

This work starts with a story of an unmanned drone pilot, talking about his live-fire mission at an undisclosed place. This work is consist of two parts. Part 1 shows a series of testimony by the drone operator recorded through skype conversation, together with aerial photo video images. Part 2 is composed of body of slides, showing each phrases of the pilot’s testimony and corresponding image, which was found through internet search using the same phrase.

Fast indicates the problem and darkness hidden in the development of technology, something surpassing human being even though it was invented / developed by human.

*1 select passages from the interview with Omer Fast by Noah Simblist http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/index.php/interview/index/195/134