Since the early 2000s, Omer Fast has been producing elegiac videos that plumb the uncertainties of history and remembrance, fiction and reality. In his latest show, he explores different avenues to connect with the past, beginning with the gallery itself, which has been transformed inside and out to resemble a Chinatown business of the kind that may have occupied the same Lower East Side address. The gesture that has sparked protest from members of the local community who deem it racist because its forlorn, abject appearance presumably caricaturizes Chinese-Americans. One can take that position or not, but arguing it overlooks the fact that any shuttered business, regrdless of the former proprietor's identity, looks abandoned and usually prompts a certain anxious realization for many passersby that something they had once taken for granted is no longer there. These feelings of loss are precisely what Fast's work wrestles with.
Here, you enter under an awning covered in Chinese characters, to find two flat screens: One plays a documentary-style narrative about a funeral home in English with Chinese subtitles; the other features just the subtitles. As a mortician explains the cosmetic tricks used to make the deceased presentable for mourners, it becomes clear that Fast’s point is less about gentrification than it is about resurrection.
A darkened back gallery hosts a 3-D film about the seminal 20th-century German photographer August Sander. He’s portrayed later in life, alone and nearly blind in a house strung with belled ropes that he gropes to get around. Lying on the floor, he conjures his younger self capturing his subjects, including a Nazi officer who approvingly recites a critic’s description of Sander’s precise style as “tender empiricism.” The officer then goes on to semi-apologetically relay the news that Sander’s son, a political internee, has died in prison. The fact that identity politics has intruded upon Fast's work doesn't belie the fact that it is deeply moving and empathetic for people and places lost to the inexorable churn of events.