Banner aka The Vanity Press (b. 1966, Merseyside)

Banner explores gender, language and conflict a range of mediums, including drawing, sculpture, performance, and the moving image.

As her moniker suggests, language and publishing are at the heart of her practice and Banner’s attitude is at once playful and often performative. Her work centres on the problems and possibilities of language, both written and metaphorical. Intermittently, when language fails, she makes work based on fullstops. From ‘wordscapes’ written transcriptions of the frame-by-frame action in Hollywood war films to her use of found and transformed military aircraft, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing a complete cycle of intimacy, attraction and alienation.

In 1997, Banner started her own publishing imprint The Vanity Press, with her monumental The Nam. She has since published many works, as books, sculptural objects or performances. In 2009 she issued herself an ISBN number and registered herself as a publication under her own name, a sort of self-portrait as a book. In 2022 she exhibited Pranayama Typhoon, at the Venice Biennale, a film depicting two military decoy fighter planes as they act out an unrequited desire for intimacy not conflict.

Her work has been exhibited in prominent international venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate Gallery, London.