time.” With the irony of the piece all but sealed up by this comment, a third layer makes the triangulation of the work even more explicit as brief “on-set” depictions of the interview itself (and the film crew behind) are slipped into the highly produced side of the installation toward the end of its twelve-minute running time. This unnecessary step undoes any potential uncertainty in the piece through doubling the casting metaphor. And yet, perhaps Fast has done a service not just for his own future works but other artists’ in exposing the too-evasive nature of the multi-channel gambit and its tendency toward attempting a comprehensive self-reflexivity. Nevertheless, as with the work of Meltzer and Thorne and Yael Bartana, Fast does move productively between the perils of testimonial and allegory.

All three of these projects risk enacting and even re-enacting their own position within a hotly debated discourse of specific historical representation while also opening up noteworthy formal approaches to narrative and the increasingly pliable

notion of documentary. And yet, the exhibition context for much new documentary film and video works made by artists too often betrays an art world preference for easily consumed moments of contestation—short in duration, abstracted in scope—leaving open the question of whether such experiments in collaborative agency suffer from being grouped under catch-all rubrics like the “documentary turn.” Emphasizing a generational shift away from appropriation techniques centred largely around the photograph, these works elaborate a re-imagined “making strange” that plays at telling history in circles far more inclusive and varied in point of view and place of production than a generation prior. As the tropes of documentary film and video—eyewitness, re-enactment, interview, travelogue, etc.—are overturned and evacuated by such delinquent manoeuvres, it is all too clear that terms beyond the documentary are needed for discussing the increased mobility between fact and fiction, document and imagination.

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