Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press: DISARM
Frith Street Gallery is delighted to announce a new exhibition of works by Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press.
In this show the artist continues to explore language, conflict and gender through a range of media, including drawing, sculpture and the moving image. Here Banner considers the possibilities and meanings embodied in the word ‘Disarm’, most notably in two recent films where nature and landscape collide with the contradictory realities of fear, destruction, naivety and hope.
In Disarm (portrait) (2023), discarded Topshop dummies are taken apart and repurposed – mannequin limbs hurtle through the sky, emblazoned with texts such as disarm, obsolete, and delegation; referring to parts of the body as well as to the body politic. Banner describes this film as ‘a gravity defiant concrete poem – which is actually more fluid than concrete.’ The film’s soundtrack, recorded by the artist with friends, heightens the surreal sense of desire, conflict and lost aspiration as it veers from the vulnerable to the grandiose, summoning the ‘runway’ as a site for aircraft as well as a theatrical fashion space.
Disarm (landscape) (2024), captures the absurdity of military flypasts which Banner describes as ‘a raw moment of extreme weather; a violent murmuration.’ This flypast manifests an instant in which language meets its limits – subverting the jingoistic message of military power, as the planes in formation race across an immense cloudscape spelling out the word DISARM. These jets perform a desire for peace rather than conflict and in doing so signal their own demise. In contrast to the scale and hubris of the flypast itself, Banner’s image seems low-key and amateur, contradicting the technological precision of the event. The action, projected here on a panoramic scale, happens amongst the birds, the sky…the banality of an undistinguished landscape… the sound coming first, waiting for the planes to erupt into the frame.
The lower gallery displays a series of graphite drawings (2024-25) which could be storyboards for, or documentation of, the flypast. The aircraft within the formation, as in the flypast itself, are different and from non-allied countries. Banner notes that the planes are named after forces of nature and yet represent its destruction. D: Flying Leopard, I: Typhoon, S: Flanker, A: Falcon, R: Golden Eagle, M: Lightning. These drawings are presented in artist-made frames formed of recast aluminium from a Tornado combat aircraft that highlight the liquid and solid properties of the material. The artist alludes too to the industrial purpose of graphite as a lubricant and probes the possibility ‘of lubricating a language that has calcified into its opposite.’
Vulva Volvo (2025) is based on a text/poem by Banner that plays with the shared etymology of the two words; Vulva emerging from a proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘to turn, revolve.’A wry look at the commodification of language, the piece attempts to re-engender the word and re-route the conspiracy of the linear notion of time and space. In The Hour (Time, the anti-hero) (2025), a mannequin’s arm, tattooed with the word DISARM, marks out the seconds and minutes; a one-armed clock which calls for urgency yet displays time as circular, something perhaps endless and unaccountable.
