Fiona Banner
aka The Vanity PressPranayama Typhoon19.04. - 22.05.2022
Patronato Salesiano Leone XIII, Venice
Fiona Banner, *1966 in Merseyside, UK,
lives and works in London, UK
Photos: Enrico Fiorese
Enabled by a partnership between Barakat Contemporary, Seoul, Frith Street Gallery, London, 1301PE, Los Angeles and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
The title of the exhibition combines the word ‘Pranayama’– an ancient breathing technique with the word ‘Typhoon’– an overwhelming and increasingly frequent natural phenomenon and the name of a state-of-the-art fighter plane.
The exhibition is held in a basketball court within a converted church at Patronato Salesiano Leone XIII, a community playground in Castello, Venice, which is a short walk from the Giardini della Biennale.
The focus of the exhibition is the film, Pranayama Organ (2021), which features two full-scale inflatable military decoy aircrafts, a Typhoon and a Falcon. In the crisp light of dawn, two aircrafts slowly inflate on the beach, coming to life like two long-slumbering creatures. The setting of the film then shifts to a grassy precipice, where two figures, including the artist, are dressed as fighter planes. Birdlike, human and automaton, the figures dance around each other in a darkly comical ritual of courtship and combat. The location of the film, a coastal area between a submerged petrified forest under the seabed, and an eroding cliff face, creates a fantastical, timeless setting that evokes alternative realities, climate change and shifting lands.
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