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The title of this exhibition combines the word ‘Pranayama’ – an ancient breathing technique with the word ‘Typhoon’– an overwhelming and increasingly frequent natural phenomenon and the name of a state-of-the-art fighter plane. Pranayama Typhoon is held in a basketball court within the converted church, at Patronato Salesiano.

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The film Pranayama Organ (2021) features two full-scale inflatable military decoy aircrafts, a Typhoon and a Falcon. Stuck in a combative bind they play out an unrequited desire for intimacy not conflict: they dream a dream of emasculating the tools of conflict but in doing so come face to face with their own demise. The location of the film is a coastal area between a submerged petrified forest and an eroding cliff face, overlooking the channel that separates the UK from mainland Europe – the characters are lost in deep time and universal conflict. At dawn the two aircraft slowly inflate on the beach, coming to life like two long- slumbering creatures. Then, on a wind-blown precipice two figures, one of which is the artist, appear dressed as Falcon and Typhoon. Birdlike, human and automaton, they dance around each other in an absurd ritual of courtship and combat. The Organ in the film’s title refers both to the massive wind instrument, and the corporeal body. The soundtrack was recorded by Banner and friends in an East London church during the 2021 lockdown, it echoes the overblown posturing of the film’s protagonists.

It is both fragile and heroic, defined by a bathetic church organ that references the iconic song Wild is the Wind. The organ’s grandiose tones and the sound of breathing fill the basketball court underscoring the tension of the work. The film, music and setting of the exhibition combine to create a space of contending ideas – grandiosity, vulnerability, bathos, brutality and nature.

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Capitalist, Capitalist, Capitalist (ellipsis), 2022 is from a series of found seascape paintings. Banner has painted-out the original subjects, seafaring vessels, battleships and destroyers, replacing them instead with black, oil-painted full stops. Though Banner is known for her text based works she has returned to this abstract form of language intermittently over the years, so these full stop works actually punctuate her studio practice. To begin with these anti-texts were a way of exploring a crisis in her own language, here they are deployed to investigate a wider crisis of language and communication; language adrift, on the precipice... Some paintings about the gulf COMMA between words PERIOD and action PERIOD Some paintings that know that the sea is the bottom line COMMA that understand that turning a page is reminiscent of a wave and that a chapter is the tide PERIOD Some paintings that are a channel HYPHEN all paintings are a channel PERIOD Some paintings that understand that the channel is not only a conduit but also a barrier ELLIPSIS

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Runway, 2021 is from a series for Korean Vogue, September 2021, when Banner was exhibiting in Seoul. She uses the format of the magazine as a droll post consurmerist performance space, using inflatable aircraft as standins for costume and prop; referencing the runway both as a theatrical fashion space and a launch pad for aircraft. In collaboration with the photographer Emma Summerton.

Dear Bathos, Love _____________, 2022, a film on a monitor shows an ISBN number – the International Standard Book Number used to identify publications – on a hymn board as the sun moves across it. Instead of indexing a hymn it references a feeling, or condition. The film is in and of itself a publication, it has been published under the title Dear Bathos, Love ___________.

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Prananyama Typhoon has been enabled through a partnership between Barakat Contemporary, Seoul, Frith Street Gallery, London, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin and 1301PE, Los Angeles.

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