Fiona Banner
Poems for Helicopter Blades
11 SEP – 31 OCT 2026
Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6–10 pm
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Vulva Volvo (1930–2021), 2025, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm.
Galerie Barbara Thumm is pleased to announce Poems for Helicopter Blades, eighth solo exhibition by Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press (*1966, Merseyside, UK), a founding member of the gallery at the gallery’s Space I, presented on the occasion of Berlin Art Week 2026.
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press explores gender, language, and conflict through a range of media, including drawing, sculpture, performance and the moving image. She considers the meaning of the body politic and the politics of the body through a playful questioning of language.
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Speaker fin, 2026, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm.
Poems for Helicopter Blades unfolds through a series of new video and sound sculptures constructed around parts of fighter aircraft.
La Fin / Runway is projected onto the canopy of a Jaguar aircraft, which formed part of her acclaimed 2010 installation Harrier and Jaguar, featuring fighter jets installed in the massive neoclassical galleries at Tate Britain. Post exhibition the body of the aircraft were melted down and stored as aluminium ingots – they feature here recast as sculptures and picture frames.
As in much of Banner’s work, the military object is stripped of its functional purpose and subjected to a process of linguistic and material displacement. What remains are unstable object, sounds and images caught between machine and sculpture, weapon and image, body and language.
Carrie Mae Weems
11 SEP – 31 OCT 2026
Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6–10 pm
Carrie Mae Weems, People in Water, 2026, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm.
The exhibition in Space II presents a recent body of work by acclaimed African-American artist Carrie Mae Weems (*1953, Portland, OR, US), one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today.
Over a career spanning more than four decades, Weems has created a complex and multifaceted body of work encompassing photography, film, installation and other media, while engaging with the social and political issues of the present which continue to shape our world today.
Carrie Mae Weems, Seaside (3), 2026, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm.
Carrie Mae Weems, Seaside (5), 2026, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm.
The works on view at Galerie Barbara Thumm are in dialogue with The Long Goodbye, a film commissioned for the opening of the V&A East in London (April-October, 2026). In the film, Weems traces how bodies of water, from their sweeping currents to soft tides, have shaped us, enabling transatlantic migration and continuing to impact communities in east London and beyond. The work explores the creation of new identities and artistic forms by the immigrants who have relocated across oceans, both voluntarily and by force.
Weems celebrates the cultural diversity that connects and underpins the foundations of contemporary cities. Transcending fear and adversity, water and networks of migration are the fuel of global creativity.
