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
8 available worksThe 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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