Projects

Pranayama Typhoon by Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press coincided with the 59th Venice Biennale. The focus of the exhibition, the film, Pranayama Organ (2021), features two full-scale inflatable military decoy aircrafts, a Typhoon and a Falcon. Stuck in a combative bind, they yearn for another future, as they play out an unrequited desire for intimacy not conflict. As the protagonists enact a dream of emasculating the tools of conflict, they recognise their own demise.

The exhibition was held in a basketball court within a converted church at Patronato Salesiano, a community youth centre in Castello, Venice. The setup of the basketball court within the church was an apt theatre for the installation’s themes of spirituality, environment, ritual and conflict. The film, music and setting all combine to create a space of contending ideas – grandiosity, bathos, brutality and nature.

A publication accompanied the exhibition featuring a text by Joanna Pocock and The Woods Decay, The Woods Decoy and Fall A Noh Play in Three Acts (2021), a collaborative and performative text, by the Tom McCarthy as T (Typhoon) and Banner as F (Falcon).

Clare Cumberlidge & Co provided curatorial and strategic direction to the project.