Fiona Banner

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press is a British artist whose art explores the complexities of conflict and language, both written and metaphorical. Her work encompasses text, sculpture, drawing, film and installation. Born in 1966 in Merseyside, northwest England, Banner studied at Kingston University before completing an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 1993. 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. Her early works took the form of ‘wordscapes’ or ‘still films’ —detailed accounts written in her own words of feature films. More recently, she has explored the idea of the art historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form in relation to her earlier transcriptions of film.

In 2002, Banner was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and in 2010, she was selected to create the 10th Duveen Hall commission at Tate Britain. She has exhibited across the world and has recently had solo exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, Ikon Gallery and Yorkshire Sculpture Park among others. Her work is held in public collections including the Arts Council, British Council and the Museum of Modern Art, New Yοrk.

“When I came into Piraeus harbor by boat recently, I saw a military submarine surface, it was heading out to sea. It slowly emerged from below, and I could not believe what I was seeing. I zoomed in on it using my phone, to get close to it, also to prove its presence. Nobody else on the boat seemed to notice. It was thrilling and frightening, I was struck that it was hidden in plain sight.”

For her final student show at Goldsmiths (London, 1995) Fiona Banner presented a vast, life-size photograph of a section of Trident nuclear submarine. She had rescaled a photograph of a very small Airfix model of Trident, as the submarine was not visible in the public sphere —something that is vast, and yet hidden. The faux heroic image of the submarine was a big wall of grey with some military markings on it, virtually abstract. It was also highly reflective, like a mirror —in looking at it you become part of it, a beast of our own making. How conflict is represented in mainstream culture (war movies, popular imagery, fashion, media channels) has been the jumping off point for Banner’s work since. Her first book was The Nam, a verbal super-movie description of Hollywood Vietnam movies, a recall of imagery she had seen on the TV as a kid, but also an indulgence and investigation at the same time, looking at the contradictions of industrialized cultural forces that she (we?) finds seductive and repulsive in equal measure.

Taking the moment of this submarine appearing, as a tactile thought, Banner will explore the Piraeus port —a major section of which is leased to China for 100 million euros a year— and try to find out more about the submarine. She will visit the Hellenic Military shipyard near Αthens where it was built —if it was indeed Greek.