Omer Fast — Everything That Rises Must Converge — Gb agency — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 24 → December 21, 2013

Everything That Rises Must Converge presents a digital film installation made up of four simultaneous synchronized projections portraying 24 hours in the life of four adult-film actors living in Los Angeles and six new photographies.

Throughout the work, the artist alternates formats. The first is documentary style, with the camera in the background recording the day. The second — interspersed as time unfolds — is a series of fictional tales about other characters in crisis. These include John, a director of adult films who talks about the traumas that brought him to this profession; Babe, a depressed woman who hopelessly tries to get her husband’s attention; Ana, a young actress who wonders what role she should play in the human tragedy.

The artist displays the routine of the everyday life of porn actors in relation to the intense and often absurd stories of the other characters. Yet again, Omer Fast blurs storylines by orchestrating a special kind of narrative normalcy, for these are in fact real porn actors acting out their lives in front of us.

Stories overlap, images harmonize, sentences match up, and every element converges at any given moment. Fast arranges his composition of multiple realities down to the smallest detail, while also setting off on an exploration of the significance of writing and poetry. The title of his work, Everything That Rises Must Converge is borrowed from the short story of the same name by the American writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). Fast is inspired by the story’s narrative structure in which its elements scatter and reconnect, and he uses the freedom of the language of political analysis found in the story.

Other literary worlds — Ana’s recitation of a Rilke poem — ultimately give this new work a strange and sometimes somber tone.

The structural building blocks of the artist are present in this video : the interview and importance of testimony, the implied ambiguity between subjectivity and truth, role-playing, the simultaneous synchronization of images and in editing, and the constant friction between a collective reality and the world of the private and intimate. What you can’t say or represent is turned into a material to produce something else, somewhere else.

With Everything That Rises Must Converge, Omer Fast continues to investigate and decode the moment when real experience turns into subjective memory, and then becomes material for an ambiguous story, and finally art.