Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press: Pranayama Typhoon Soft Parts Wing Flap Fin

The exhibition title combines the word “Pranayama”—an ancient breathing technique—with the word “Typhoon,” an overwhelming and increasingly frequent natural phenomenon which is also the name of a state-of-the-art fighter plane. In this solo exhibition, British artist Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press (b. 1966) presents, among other works, the video Pranayama Organ (2021), which features two full-scale inflatable military decoy aircrafts: a Typhoon and a Falcon. At dawn, the two aircrafts come to life, accompanied by the grandiose sound of a church organ. Beanbags in the form of life-size aircraft parts (Soft Parts: Wing, Flap, Fin, 2022) invite visitors to linger, while a fighter jet slowly fills with air and collapses again.

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press lives and works in London, UK. Her work explores gender, language and publishing through a range of mediums, including drawing, sculpture, performance and the moving image. The struggle between language and its limitations is central to Banner’s work. Banner often works under the moniker of The Vanity Press. She established the imprint in 1997, with her seminal book The Nam. Since then, she has published many works, some in the form of books, some sculptural, some performance based. In 2009 she issued herself an ISBN number and registered herself as a publication under her own name.