Omer Fast, Spring, 2016

Exhibition view, Omer Fast - Continuous Present, Baltic Center For Contemporary Arts, Gateshead, 2016

HD Video installation with five-screen projection, sound
Duration 44 minutes, looped
Edition of 6 (+ 2 A.P.)

Spring is a multi-screen projection exploring the themes of longing, loss and recovery. The work is a companion piece to the earlier work, Continuity, originally commissioned for Documenta in 2012. In Spring, we continue to follow the same middle-aged German couple who hire young men to act as their son. The story revolves around a teenaged boy and an older male escort who are both engaged by the couple and whose paths cross violently on the streets of a wealthy suburb. A portrait of family life in which roles are played with perversion and pleasure, Spring also deals with loss and recovery, drug usage, small-town mafiosi, the orient, the internet and -of course- incest.
The film literally weaves these new narratives into the previous film and takes us back and forth in time, while introducing new characters which haunt us. The closed frames and composition from Continuity shift to an open story. The horizontal construction of the previous piece becomes a vertical one introducing past and future.
The disturbing strangeness of the the frozen ‘’tableaux vivants’’ turns into a dynamic cinematographic rhythm. And whereas the shorter Continuity was tight and theatrical, this new film presents a more rounded view of its protagonists, who are now more fragile and human. Spring is a real challenge in terms of form, narrative construction, and tension achieved brilliantly.