Omer Fast works with cinematic and installation formats that interweave documentation and fiction, thereby breaking down the boundaries between reality, memory, and narrative. Fast repeatedly addresses the intertwining of personal experience, trauma, and collective history, focusing on motifs such as the military, war, repression, and ghosts of the past. His works create ambivalent, often disturbing visual worlds in which reality and fiction, past and present flow into one another, thus making the mechanisms of power, memory, and identity formation tangible.

Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972.⁠ ⁠He holds a BA in English from Tufts University, a BFA in Visual Arts from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. Since completing his studies in 2000, Fast has had solo exhibitions at the Allen Art Museum, Ohio, (2025); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2021); Salzburger Kunstverein (2019); Times Art Museum, Guangzhou (2018); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2016), Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015), and the Whitney Museum, New York (2010). Group exhibitions include dOCUMENTA13, Kassel (2012) and Venice Biennale (2011).

Fast received the Bucksbaum Prize for his work The Casting at the Whitney Biennial 2008 and the National Gallery Prize for Young Art in Berlin 2009 with his work Nostalgia. His works are included in several international collections, including the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Centre Pompidou. Fast’s first feature film, Remainder, an adaptation of the novel by Tom McCarthy, premiered at the Berlinale in 2016.⁠ ⁠His second feature film, Abendland, was released in theaters in 2024.⁠ ⁠Since 2023, Omer Fast has been a professor of film at the HFBK Hamburg.