Studies / Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press – ‘ISBN 978-1-913983-97-0 (EVERY WORD UNMADE)’

Saturday 21 March 2026 12:00
Saturday 25 April 2026 17:00

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Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Publication (ISBN 0-9548366-7-7)’, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. Design: Tom Joyes.

Our first exhibition of 2026 is the first in a new, annual series, entitled ‘Studies’, developed in conjunction with the Roberts Institute of Art. Each exhibition will draw from the collection to present key works by major artists. ‘Studies’ centres upon well-established artistic practices and works made in the 1990s – 2000s that particularly connect with now. The first exhibition in the series is focussed on a work by Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press.

‘ISBN 978-1-913983-97-0 (EVERY WORD UNMADE)’ is an exhibition in the form of a poem and it is Banner’s most recent publication. Incorporating works from 1996 to 2026, it embodies a span of time and at the same time it is an anti-chronological, momentary, present-tense reading. Working with a range of media, including drawing, sculpture and performance, Banner attends to the malleable flexibility of language as a means through which to explore conflict and gender. Registering this exhibition as a publication typifies her iconoclastic, playful attitude to publishing.

‘Every Word Unmade’ (2006–2007) is a neon alphabet hand-made by the artist, who bent hot glass into the 26 letterforms of the alphabet. The struggle against and with the medium, and with language itself is evident. As Banner has said, “words are extensions of our physical selves, so I started to explore the physicality of words”.

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, ‘Every Word Unmade’, 2007 (detail). Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. Artwork courtesy the David and Indrė Roberts.

It is a work, like many of Banner’s, about communication and the building blocks of language: here fragile and faltering, combined, in its use of neon, with the seductive language of the street and commerce. When it was first made, ‘Every Word Unmade’ represented a pause in Banner’s densely verbal work that addressed the myths and narratives of conflict – a spirited attempt to denude language of its manipulative power and start again.

The dense textual wordscape of ‘THE NAM’ (1997), a monumental compendium of Vietnam war films, narrated in her own words, is revisited in today’s context. It is presented alongside ‘VULVA VOLVO (1930-2021)’ (2025), a concise double-entendre text sculpture cast from the aluminium of a melted down Tornado ZE728 warplane. Together with other works, from ‘Mortal Coil’ (2026) published in conjunction with this exhibition, to ‘Disarm’ (2024-2026), they demonstrate the coherence and consistency of Banner’s engagement with linguistic power structures, physical bodies, temporality, conflict and hubris.

‘Every Word Unmade’ (2007) is courtesy of the David and Indrė Roberts Collection.

About the artist /

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press explores gender, language, interpretation and publishing through a range of media, including drawing, sculpture, performance and moving image. The struggle between language and its limitations is central to Banner’s conceptual approach. With an interest in how conflict is mythologised through popular culture, her early work took the form of ‘wordscapes’ or ‘still films’, blow-by-blow accounts in her own words of feature films, from war movies to porn, from intimate scenes to historical events. These works evolved into solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen.

In 1997 Banner started her own publishing imprint The Vanity Press, with her monumental The Nam. She has since published many works, as books, sculptural objects or performances. In 2009 she issued herself an ISBN number and registered herself as a publication under her own name.

About the Roberts Institute of Art /

The Roberts Institute of Art (RIA) is a non-profit contemporary arts organisation. They commission pioneering performance art, run a residency programme in Scotland, collaborate with national partners on exhibitions and work to research and share the David and Indrė Roberts Collection.

The David and Indrė Roberts Collection features nearly 2,500 works by over 900 artists, dating from the mid-20th century to today. The collection is rooted in a passion for contemporary art and an ambition to share extraordinary work by some of the world’s most influential artists and to support artists at different stages of their careers.