Post by dashboll on Nov 3, 2015 17:08:20 GMT
Fiona Banner
Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling
10 October 2015 — 17 January 2016
First and Second Floor Galleries and Tower Room
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Please note the Tower Room is only accessible via a number of steps
Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of work by British artist Fiona Banner. Ikon represents key early projects alongside recent and unseen works that span a period of 25 years.
Banner came to prominence in the 1990s with her wordscapes, written transcriptions of iconic films retold in her own words. THE NAM (1997) is a 1,000 page book that details, scene-by-scene, six Vietnam War films — including Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now — in such a way that they blur into each other. The outcome is, in the artist’s words, the literary equivalent of a “gutting 11 hour supermovie”.
In a recent collaboration with the Archive of Modern Conflict, Banner commissioned a Magnum photographer to take pictures of London’s financial district as if it was a war zone. The resulting work uses Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness as a filter through which to read the tribal behaviour of those in the business of finance, an environment of weary survivalism combining competitive trading floors, corporate art collections, manic drinking cultures, luxury shopping and strip clubs. Ikon shows a related series of large-scale graphite drawings entitled Mistah Kurtz — He Not Dead (2015), depicting magnified details of pinstripe, the iconic costume and camouflage of trade in the City.
Recently completed films mark a new trajectory in Banner’s practice. Chinook (2013) focuses on the absurdist spectacle of UK military air shows in which a Chinook helicopter performs an aerial ballet, carefully choreographed to push the craft to its limit for the purpose of display.
Punctuating the gallery are various Full Stop (2015) sculptures: full stops in different fonts, blown up to human proportions. Previously incarnated in bronze, here they are presented as bean bags and within the exhibition provide a moment to sit, to pause for thought. Banner’s tactile approach to material is evident too in Work 3 (2014), a lifesized glass scaffold tower which stands tall in Ikon’s vaulted space, its fragility undermining any possibility of usefulness.
Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling
10 October 2015 — 17 January 2016
First and Second Floor Galleries and Tower Room
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Please note the Tower Room is only accessible via a number of steps
Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of work by British artist Fiona Banner. Ikon represents key early projects alongside recent and unseen works that span a period of 25 years.
Banner came to prominence in the 1990s with her wordscapes, written transcriptions of iconic films retold in her own words. THE NAM (1997) is a 1,000 page book that details, scene-by-scene, six Vietnam War films — including Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now — in such a way that they blur into each other. The outcome is, in the artist’s words, the literary equivalent of a “gutting 11 hour supermovie”.
In a recent collaboration with the Archive of Modern Conflict, Banner commissioned a Magnum photographer to take pictures of London’s financial district as if it was a war zone. The resulting work uses Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness as a filter through which to read the tribal behaviour of those in the business of finance, an environment of weary survivalism combining competitive trading floors, corporate art collections, manic drinking cultures, luxury shopping and strip clubs. Ikon shows a related series of large-scale graphite drawings entitled Mistah Kurtz — He Not Dead (2015), depicting magnified details of pinstripe, the iconic costume and camouflage of trade in the City.
Recently completed films mark a new trajectory in Banner’s practice. Chinook (2013) focuses on the absurdist spectacle of UK military air shows in which a Chinook helicopter performs an aerial ballet, carefully choreographed to push the craft to its limit for the purpose of display.
Punctuating the gallery are various Full Stop (2015) sculptures: full stops in different fonts, blown up to human proportions. Previously incarnated in bronze, here they are presented as bean bags and within the exhibition provide a moment to sit, to pause for thought. Banner’s tactile approach to material is evident too in Work 3 (2014), a lifesized glass scaffold tower which stands tall in Ikon’s vaulted space, its fragility undermining any possibility of usefulness.