Artist back at Tate after porn controversy

Artist Fiona Banner has been invited to create an installation for Tate Britain, eight years after plastering the gallery's space with a vivid description of a pornographic film.

Banner, who creates vast unedited descriptions of movies, including war films and pornographic tales, will undertake Tate Britain's Duveens Commission.

Artists who have previously taken on the job include Eva Rothschild, who filled the galleries with a huge black "zig zag" sculpture.

Banner's work is being tipped to challenge the expectations of the neo-classical Duveen galleries in London.

She said: "I'm looking forward to the prospect of working within the phallic pillars of this extraordinary grandiose space."

Banner's new work, created specially for the galleries at the heart of Tate Britain, will be unveiled on June 28 and displayed until January 3, 2011.

In 2002 Banner was nominated for the Turner Prize and her Tate Britain exhibition for the prize included A***woman in Wonderland, a description of a pornographic film displayed on a billboard in pink ink.

Banner, who was born in Merseyside and lives in London, has recently addressed nudity, transcribing into words her candid observations of a life model.

For Mirror (2007), she made a written portrait of actress Samantha Morton, posing nude in the artist's studio.

Morton read out the description, which she had not previously seen, to a live audience, in what Banner has described as a "striptease in words".

In 1997 Banner published The Nam, a vast 1,000-page tome describing six Vietnam War films in meticulous detail.

The completion of this epic work was marked by a tiny neon full stop, which later led to a series of sculptures of enlarged punctuation marks in various fonts.

Judith Nesbitt, chief curator at Tate Britain, said: "Fiona Banner's works arrest the eye and the mind; they are both seductive and unsettling.

"I greatly look forward to seeing her imaginative response to the spaces of Tate Britain's Duveens galleries when the work is unveiled this summer."

The Duveens Commission is supported by Sotheby's.