Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press: Poems for Helicopter Blades

Galerie Barbara Thumm is honoured to present Poems for Helicopter Blades by Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, a founding artist of the gallery. In Poems for Helicopter Blades, Banner continues her exploration of language, conflict and gender across a wide range of media. The exhibition unfolds through a series of new video and sound sculptures built around parts of fighter aircraft. The film La Fin / Runway, projected onto the cockpit windscreen of a Jaguar aircraft, recalls the innocence of early cinema far more than the high technology of contemporary warfare. The screen was once the enormous eye of Jaguar XZ118, part of Banner's 2010 installation Harrier & Jaguar, for which two fighter jets were installed in the neoclassical galleries of Tate Britain. After the exhibition, Banner melted down the main bodies of both aircraft and stored them as aluminium ingots; the metal reappears elsewhere in the show, recast as sculpture and frames. In La Fin / Runway a small cast – among them Banner and her teenage daughter – pose as, and with, two inflatable aircraft, a Falcon and a Typhoon. Played out on the small theatre of a catwalk that merges a magazine shoot, a theatrical fashion space and an aircraft landing strip, the film becomes a strange parody of the arenas of fashion and of global conflict. Humans act as aircraft and aircraft as beasts in an absurd ballet; creatures of the page as much as of the wind, they seem caught in a story of seduction, conflict, loss and hope. The film draws on images from Banner's 2021 shoot for Vogue Korea, in which she and her long-time collaborator, the photographer Emma Summerton, used the magazine as a wry post-human performance space, with inflatable aircraft standing in for costume and props. Falcon and Typhoon – fighter planes active on the world stage today – are also forces of nature: a bird of prey and an awesome, increasingly destructive wind. The posturing human-beast-automatons enact both a merging with nature and a tender, sad, euphoric loss of it. They stage a fantasy of emasculating the tools of conflict while acting out an unrequited desire for intimacy over alienation, absurdly dramatising the small theatre of the photo shoot, the magazine page and the runway. The soundtrack of La Fin / Runway emanates from Speaker Fin, the mirror-polished tail fin of a Harrier jet transformed into an audio speaker. Veering from the vulnerable to the grandiose and summoning the bathos of the runway as a forlorn stage, the track heightens a surreal sense of desire, conflict and lost aspiration. Recorded by the artist and friends, it draws obliquely on Wild is the Wind and Swan Lake, evoking the interplay of human, bird and doppelgänger in the ballet and recalling the transient, ephemeral nature of a magazine. Banner is known for her iconoclastic and playful approach to publishing: in 2009 she issued herself an ISBN and registered herself as a publication, 'a sort of ongoing performance about the myth of biography'. A new publication, Pas de Deux (Tip Toe), incorporates two rotor blades from a Gazelle helicopter. Standing upright, they suggest human figures, animals or totems; designed to spin horizontally, they now appear to balance on tiptoe, performing a kind of sculptural ballet. The blades double as publications, each with its own ISBN painted on it, published by The Vanity Press under the titles Tip and Toe – a nod to their precarity, and to ours. Mortal Coil is Banner's most recent publication. A performative gallery guide, it is as much an object as a text, gradually unwinding and coming apart as pieces are torn off and read. It includes an absurdist piece of live writing with the novelist Tom McCarthy, in which the two assume the inflated posturing – and deflation – of the film's protagonists, likewise a T and an F (Tornado and Falcon). Books From Other is a series of sculptural paintings: texts on sliced rotor blades, presented as single pages and spreads. The texts respond to the form of the blades, which evoke both the gutter and margin of a page and the curves of the body. VULVA VOLVO (1930–2021) is a sculpture based on an extended text-poem that riffs on the shared etymology of the two words. Banner edited the text down to a single word, 'vulva', carved and cast to emulate the iconic Volvo typeface – a wry look at the commodification of language and an attempt to re-gender the word and to reroute the linear conception of time and space. It is sand-cast in recycled aluminium from the Jaguar, the metal reborn as a word: primal and elemental. A related series of graphite drawings, also titled Vulva Volvo, references Volvo typography from different eras. The drawings play on slippages of language and on the graphite they are made of – its mineral content and its industrial use as a lubricant – as if proposing a way to lubricate a language that has calcified into its opposite. Banner describes the painting Disarm, Disarm as 'a gravity-defiant concrete poem – which is actually more fluid than concrete'. Referring to parts of the body as well as to the body politic, it shows two arms tattooed with the word Disarm floating through space. Held in an artist's frame cast from the stored aluminium of Harrier ZE695, the painting is also a sculpture – and, like the word Disarm itself, the frame is perhaps naïve, unstable, vulnerable. The word is spelled out once more, this time by birds, in Flypast (2026), a delicate photogravure that subverts the absurd ego of military flypasts – which Banner describes as 'a raw moment of extreme weather; a violent murmuration' – turning them into a natural phenomenon performed by birds. As so often in Banner's work, the military object is stripped of its function and subjected to a process of linguistic and material displacement. What remains are unstable objects, sounds and images suspended between machine and sculpture, weapon and image, body and language. Emma Summerton is a photographer with more than fifty Vogue covers to her name and one of the few women to have shot the Pirelli Calendar. Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio; his new novel, The Rhyl Poster, is published in October 2026.