Fiona Banner





You may have seen photos of this exhibition already - Fiona Banner at the Tate. The Harrier looks to me like an enormous shark, strung from a gantry. Its the upside-down silver Jaguar that I really like, the alien form of it, the way it looks like it has just fallen from the sky, and the juxtapostion of the shiny futuristic surfaces with the warm romanesque stone of the gallery. Both pieces of military hardware take on the form of powerful captured beasts. Strange how the positioning of an object can render it mundane, or elevate it into something special. She could have been pedestrian and just displayed a shiny plane as is. But she chose to flip it on it's back and made it into something memorable. I would love to go and see it when I'm next in London.



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2 comments:

zmkc said...

I usually hate installations, but I could almost make an exception for this: it's the daring of it. Imagine thinking of sticking a plane inside the Tate - and then imagine actually going ahead and doing it.

Susan said...

Curiously incongruous!