Tom McCarthy: The Geometer

To mark the publication of his new novel, The Rhyl Poster, Tom McCarthy performs its central chapter beneath an image-track devised by Omer Fast. For years, both artists’ work has hovered, drone-like, above the spots where memory, technology, war and aesthetics intersect one another. The new collaboration amplifies these overlays: against a backdrop of the Second Gulf War, it explores the architectural, mathematical and colonial dimensions of the practice of surveying, in order to uncover, at the base of all geometry, a primordial violence.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. He is recipient of the Believer Book Award and the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, an Internationaler Literaturpreis Finalist, and a two-time Booker Prize Finalist. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His new novel, The Rhyl Poster, is published in November 2026.

Omer Fast is an artist, filmmaker and professor at the Hamburg University of the Arts. His solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum in New York, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, Museum of Modern Art in Vienna and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin; and his group exhibitions include dOCUMENTA13 and the 52nd Venice Biennale. Fast’s short film CONTINUITY won the German short film award LOLA in 2013. His third feature film ABENDLAND premiered in 2024.

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