“Making art is ridiculous”: British artist Fiona Banner is holding on to humour in the Brexit era

“I don’t know how much you know about my work,” modestly speculates Fiona Banner, as she guides me through the back door of Galerie Barbara Thumm, still crowded with cardboard and paint. “Historically, it’s very verbal,” she continues, “then at some point, I ran out of words, you know, as we all do sometimes.”

For her solo presentation Full Sea Stop Scape, the British artist — who also works under her publishing persona The Vanity Press — has installed four large black, helium-filled inflatable sculptures at the Berlin gallery’s new project space, which opened during Gallery Weekend last week. At first glance, they look like hot-air balloons or zeppelins of sorts, which would make sense, given Banner’s long-standing obsession with air-crafts and military hardware. While the artist doesn’t reject this idea, that’s not what she had in mind when she started the project. “I was thinking about language being a bit lost,” she says of the circular, floating sculptures which are, in fact, 3D full stops (“anti-language,” she calls them).

Emerging in the mid-90s as part of the Britart frenzy, Banner has since developed a complex body of work, often focusing on the limitations of language and operating at the intersection of publishing, sculpture and performance. For the 2010 Duveens Commission, the artist repurposed two former fighter jets into the neoclassical building of Tate Britain (an “anomaly” in her work, she tells me). Meanwhile, her entry for the 2002 Turner Prize was an elaborate descriptive transcript of a porn film, printed in pink ink on a billboard. These “wordscapes,” as she calls them, have also taken the form of a 1,000-page book of shot-by-shot descriptions of Vietnam war films — likely as enduring to write as it is to read.

“My interest in words and language has been as much about what it can’t do, about its failures,” Banner explains as we skirt around the large sculptures, cramming the narrow project space. “Words are not always an appropriate medium,” she continues, “they can’t accommodate as we need them to.” At first, the full stop sculptures weren’t meant for a gallery context. When Banner conceived them in 2016, sooner after the Brexit referendum, she’d envisioned them floating on the English Channel, as part of a commission at De La Warr Pavilion, on the British coast. After weeks of precariously venturing the waters with coastguards (presumably a welcome distraction from their ongoing migrant hunt) the sculptures were declared unfit for the job, and given another life.

But the Channel has remained central to the project. For Banner, it represents a site of contention, a vague promise to freedom which only comes complete with the possibility of invasion — depending from which side you’re observing it. “As an island we’re obsessed with our parameter,” says the artist of her native England, increasingly tormented by the uncertainty of its position in Europe. “We all have obsessions with borders, and yet we want to be global,” she observes of the inherent absurdity of populist politics. The full stop sculptures, made of polystyrene and bronze, are shown alongside found engravings and paintings, overpainted and superimposed with full stops from various fonts.

Painting, in fact, was the artist’s first call. But sometime after graduating from Goldsmiths’ College in London — birthplace of the much-mediatised YBA movement led by Damien Hirst et al. — things changed. “I’m not!” she is quick to respond, after I comment that I’d never thought of her as a painter. A brief moment later, she has doubts: “Or maybe I am?” Indeed, her investment in painting has always been rather literal. In the mid-00s, she started staging ‘nude performances’, during which models would pose for her — much like in the grand tradition of the nude painting — but instead of opting for a figurative representation, Banner would write down words on a large canvas, describing their complexions and movements. “I became conscious that the way I used language was very painterly,” the artist remembers.

The dynamic of these works was grounded in dislocation and voyeurism, somewhere between a profound reflection on subjectivity and pure mockery. Between the model, the artist and the audience, who is to tell who the observer and the observee truly are? A twisted scenario characterised by an aloof sense of humour, much in the spirit of Banner’s Britart peers. “Making art is ridiculous!” the artist jokes, as we discuss the role of humour in her work, otherwise tainted by the heaviness of its subjects. “At the same time, it’s this totally dedicated practice,” she continues, smiling. “The schism of that is quite funny.”

Since then, performance art has been on a roll. From Anne Imhof’s absurdly cool Sex at Tate, to the Venice Biennale’s first official live art programme, we’re far from the once-obscure art of the happening. “Performance was a dirty word in the 1990s,” Banner remembers. But this was also a moment of profound shift for the contemporary art world, which increasingly moved its attention away from the object to focus on the context. So how have things changed? “I think people are looking for an unmediated experience,” she says. “But ironically, that experience ends up being contained in a mediated way.”

Back in the project room, the full stops stand unshakably straight, like soldiers prepared for battle. Will they ever see the Channel again? “I think one day that project will happen,” Banner muses. But for now, they’re here, on the continent.

Full Sea Stop Scape is up at Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin until 4 May 2019