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Omer Fast’s video installation The Casting was edited from conversations he recorded in Texas in 2006 with a young U.S. Army sergeant preparing to depart for his second tour in Iraq. The sergeant recounts two stories, which Fast artfully splices and interweaves, blending the narrator’s recollections of a date with a psychologically unstable woman in Germany and the accidental shooting of a civilian in Iraq. The account shifts abruptly between the stories, with two screens displaying dramatic reenactment of the tale performed silently on one side, and footage of the interview between Fast and the sergeant on the reverse.

The story is framed by Fast’s exchanges with the sergeant during the beginning and conclusion of the interview, interpreted in the reenactment as a casting director asking questions of the actor who will play the sergeant. Fast slips between the roles of interviewer, artist, therapist and film director, concluding the work with the final spliced-together statement: “I’m more interested in… the way that experience is basically turned into memory and then the way that memories become stories, the way that memories become… mediated; they get recorded and broadcast and things like that.”

In The Casting as well as in previous video installations, Fast betrays a sharp interest in the nuanced mechanics of storytelling and recollection, exploring the distance between lived experience and the way it is recounted. By taking in the installation from every angle, the viewer becomes both physically and psychologically immersed in the sergeant’s account. The physical plan of the installation deftly enhances the sensation that any experience—and its retelling—is utterly fractured and intriguingly complex.