Fiona Banner and the bastard words

Fiona Banner has spent decades probing the possibilities and limits of language. Her art does not merely depict or describe; it translates, transmutes, and interrogates. She converts words into images and images into words, revealing the porous boundary between seeing and reading, between perception and interpretation. She has even registered herself as a book in the British Library, an act that crystallizes her lifelong fascination with language as both medium and subject.

From the Shoreditch studio of the late 1990s, where a young Banner meticulously absorbed every detail of six Hollywood Vietnam War films, to the gallery performance in which actress Samantha Morton enacts a text derived from her own nude body, Banner’s work consistently asks: how faithfully can language capture the world? And when it cannot, what does that failure reveal about freedom, perception, and the very nature of communication?

Her monumental projects—The Nam, a 1,000-page literary brick cataloging every frame of the Vietnam War films, or Mirror, a single canvas of 965 words describing Morton’s body—underscore a radical preoccupation: words are simultaneously liberating and betraying. Neon installations, punctuation sculptures, alphabet frames, and the conversion of ISBN numbers into gravestones all extend this inquiry, demonstrating that the power of language lies in its elasticity, its capacity to disappoint, and its ability to liberate.

Banner’s work challenges us to confront the space between what we see, what we read, and what we imagine. It insists that the act of translation—between body and text, image and word—is never neutral. And in doing so, she positions herself not simply as an observer of language, but as one of its most audacious practitioners, turning the very act of communication into a site of radical exploration.

From Shoreditch to Textual Obsession

It is 1997 in London. Shoreditch is in the midst of its most fevered phase of gentrification. In a modest studio, Banner, freshly graduated from a prestigious art school, watches six long Hollywood films about the Vietnam War repeatedly. She studies every detail, commits each moment to memory, takes meticulous notes. This is preparatory work for what would become one of her first major investigations into the interplay of text and image.

A decade later, on a winter or early spring day, British actress Samantha Morton arrives in the same studio to pose nude. Banner observes: “Her skin resembles a wounded peach. Her eyes are like jewels.” Behind the canvas, Banner works with the same intensity and rigor as she had with her Vietnam War research.

The result of these sessions is Mirror: a text entirely in capital letters, 965 words and 6,316 characters, transcribed onto a single canvas. Rather than producing a visual artwork, Banner records every motion, every quiver, every subtle gesture of Morton’s body in language.

And what of The Nam, the culmination of her decade-long engagement with the Vietnam War films? It is a 1,000-page tome that documents every frame, every detail of all six films. It is a literary “brick,” a monumental translation of the visual into text.

Translating Images into Words

Why does Banner continually attempt to convert visual worlds into language? Morton’s nude study would later become a performance in a gallery, where the actress enacts a text inspired by her own body, unseen until that moment. Here lies a fundamental question for Banner: how does the image observed in a studio differ from the image experienced in performance? Do viewers perceive Morton’s skin as a wounded peach, her eyes as jewels, in the same way Banner does? Can words ever fully capture a visual experience?

For Banner, the allure is not in providing answers but in posing questions. “Words are as liberating as they are disappointing,” she remarks. This duality—the capacity of language to both empower and frustrate—is the engine of her practice.

The Power, Plasticity, and Freedom of Language

Words are parentless, yet perhaps for that very reason, they are free.

A Turner Prize nominee and part of the Young British Artists group and the Goldsmiths University school, Banner has produced numerous landmark works: The Nam, Mirror, and a pink billboard transcribing a pornographic film scene in obsessive detail. She animates Orson Welles’ adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, creates colossal dot sculptures, transforms punctuation into tableaux, constructs nonexistent book colophons, annotates blank books’ typographical features, frames the alphabet letter by letter, and even converts a book’s ISBN into a gravestone.

Even as she produces monumental public works—aerial warfare displays or giant church bells—her most vital, concentrated vein is always language: words, communication, and the possibilities of text. The Bastard Word (2007), a neon installation declaring its title in bright letters, distills this ethos: words are bastards, capable of disappointment yet also liberation.

Becoming a Book

Banner’s formal experimentation reaches its apogee when she registers herself as a book in the British Library.

“I belong neither to the fast-paced world of art, which demands instant recognition, nor to any literary or poetic tradition,” she explains. She does not produce texts simply to be read. Her story of sending The Nam to English writer Geoff Dyer—who returned it saying, “I don’t think you wrote this to be read, so I cannot read it”—reflects this philosophy. Banner’s work is concerned with language itself: its power, its games, and its formats.

At the limit of her exploration of format, Banner becomes a book. Registered in the British publishing system, Fiona Banner is literally a book. Imagine a text written entirely about her at age 41: she visualizes it not as biography alone, but as an allegory of words themselves, an arrow pointing to the freedom and betrayal inherent in language.

Words as Radical Practice

Across her work, Fiona Banner interrogates the delicate space between perception and articulation, image and text, body and word. She challenges us to question not only what we see, but how we describe it, how we translate it, and how our very attempts at translation reveal both the limits and the liberatory potential of language. In the playful rigor, obsessive detail, and audacious scale of her projects, Banner emerges as one of the most radical practitioners of contemporary art: a maker who treats words as both medium and subject, capable of disappointing us even as they set us free.

For the full interview in Turkish: https://www.unlimitedrag.com/art-unlimited