Fiona Banner / Carrie Mae Weems

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Fiona Banner, *1966 in Merseyside, UK, lives and works in London, UK

She became known for her early written transcriptions of Hollywood war films such as Top Gun and Apocalypse Now. From these ‘wordscapes’ to her use of found and transformed military aircraft, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing a complete cycle of intimacy, attraction and alienation. Publishing, in the broadest sense, is at the heart of her practice. In 1997 she started working under the title of The Vanity Press. She has published books, objects and performances – often deploying a playful attitude and bringing pseudo grandeur to the act of publishing.

The film Pranayama Organ (2021) features two full-scale inflatable military decoy aircrafts, a Typhoon and a Falcon. Stuck in a combative bind they play out an unrequited desire for intimacy not conflict: they dream a dream of emasculating the tools of conflict but in doing so come face to face with their own demise. The location of the film is a coastal area between a submerged petrified forest and an eroding cliff face, overlooking the channel that separates the UK from mainland Europe – the characters are lost in deep time and universal conflict. At dawn the two aircraft slowly inflate on the beach, coming to life like two long- slumbering creatures. Then, on a wind-blown precipice two figures, one of which is the artist, appear dressed as Falcon and Typhoon. Birdlike, human and automaton, they dance around each other in an absurd ritual of courtship and combat. The Organ in the film’s title refers both to the massive wind instrument, and the corporeal body. The soundtrack was recorded by Banner and friends in an East London church during the 2021 lockdown, it echoes the overblown posturing of the film’s protagonists.

It is both fragile and heroic, defined by a bathetic church organ that references the iconic song Wild is the Wind. The organ’s grandiose tones and the sound of breathing fill the basketball court underscoring the tension of the work. The film, music and setting of the exhibition combine to create a space of contending ideas – grandiosity, vulnerability, bathos, brutality and nature.

Dear Bathos, Love _____________, 2022, a film on a monitor shows an ISBN number – the International Standard Book Number used to identify publications – on a hymn board as the sun moves across it. Instead of indexing a hymn it references a feeling, or condition. The film is in and of itself a publication, it has been published under the title Dear Bathos, Love ___________.

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