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All the World’s Fighter Planes, 2005-2006 Image from the video © Fiona Banner Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery |
FIONA BANNER
(Version française)
All the World’s Fighter Planes
January 31 – May 2, 2010
OPENING : January 31, 2010, 2 pm
Tour of the exhibit with the curator, 1 pm
Curator : Gaëtane Verna
All the World’s Fighter Planes is the title of a video made in 2005-2006 by the English artist Fiona Banner and screened recently at Nuit Blanche 2009 in Paris. For this project the artist created a video out of newsprint photos of all the models of fighter plane currently in commission. For an hour, images of these planes go by in time to a sound track of military marches and rousing war movie scores. It is a powerful work of art which despite the simplicity of its structure succeeds in evoking intense emotion.
Although Banner’s method may resemble the painstaking work of a scientist or a collector, the results nevertheless evoke violent haste. We are in a world of action, accumulation, speed. The images seem to have been cut out, even torn out, carelessly, so that here and there we glimpse fragments of text or parts of words truncated by a large pair of scissors. The illustrations themselves, sketches or photos, are left in the rough, the aim being not to enhance but rather to show, name and list them. The animation and the music add another symbolic dimension to this collection of images, which the artist had already exhibited in book form in 2004.
Fiona Banner’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States and in Europe. Her creations can be found in major collections such as those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Arts Council England and the Tate Gallery in London. Banner, who was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2003, lives and works in London, where she is represented by the Frith Street Gallery.