Omer Fast’s surreal video installation Continuity follows a German couple who pick up their son from a local train station. A familiar domestic environment with emotional parents soon gives way to a series of anomalies and what initially appears as a conventional scenario is upended, via a deliberate blurring of boundaries between documentary, dramatisation, and fantasy. The work shifts between perspectives and cinematic conventions to achieve what Fast describes as a state of ‘productive confusion’; it becomes unclear whether the couple has suffered an actual loss or if they are performing an obsessive ritual that keeps them together. Using repetition, re-enactment and multiple takes of a given scene as a way of offering an insight into loss and mourning, Fast’s work is a fiction with the air of authenticity – a reminder that the work of a filmmaker can disrupt as effectively as it can reveal.

Omer Fast is an Israeli-born artist based in Berlin, Germany. Continuity was commissioned for Documenta 13 in 2012 and won the German Film Academy Special Prize for Short Film in 2013.

Catalogue essay by Kate Warren.