Fiona Banner | Frieze
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, ‘Pranayama Organ’, 2021, installation view, Patronato Salesiano XIII, Venice, 2022.
BY SEAN BURNS IN CRITIC'S GUIDES | 22 APR 22
“Fiona Banner’s installation, ‘Pranayama Typhoon’, occupies a school gymnasium at Patronato Salesiano. As with all of the artist’s work, everything is cleverly interconnected for the viewer to decode. The ISBN number of the exhibition’s publication also appears on a small screen in the show, while the painting Capitalist, Capitalist, Capitalist (Ellipsis) (2022), containing rock-sized full-stops in a landscape, hangs on the gym’s basketball hoop. The central video, Pranayama Organ(2021), features two performers dressed as floppy fighter jets jostling on a beach: it’s a flaccid and futile distillation of failed, warmongering masculinity. Banner has been recycling this motif for over a decade: the Typhoon and Falcon jets are heavy signifiers of human ingenuity and destruction.”