If you’re quick, and not too far from the capital, there are a couple of days left to catch a remarkable exhibition titled Rebirth of a Nation. The venue is Dray Walk, off Brick Lane, London E1, but the stark and witty imagery has migrated to the surrounding streets and alleyways.
The brainchild of Americana-obsessed UK artist Ben Turnbull, toiling in cahoots with his maverick alter-ego Candidate Q, the series of artworks collaged from villains, comic superheroes and kitsch advertising ephemera tells the terrifying story of MAGA and Trump’s second coming.
Turnbull created the first of his Rebirth of a Nation series in 2022, when most reasonable folk all thought the US bare-faced liar-in-chief was finished. Alas, his diet of division and disruption is very much back on the menu.
Featuring Capitol rioter and “QAnon shaman” Jacob Chansley in horned headdress, furs and face paint superimposed on a 1970s film poster for Alan J Pakula’s political thriller The Parallax View, this work proved to be a rumination on conspiracy culture and prescient harbinger of the ultimate resurgence of alt-right populism in America and, it would seem, across the world.
The brilliant visual activist powerhouse that is @grow_up_art_ are also directing their critical ire towards a veritable rogues’ gallery of dangerous right wing dingbats: Trump, Vance, Farage, Musk, Netanyahu and Putin all appeared on the streets in their finest Nazi uniforms and regalia.
When these bold, graphic black and white posters went up, crowds flocked around to share the carnivalesque atmosphere, thoroughly enjoying a 2D public pillorying of six self-righteous, self-serving and minacious manchildren, aka The Turd Reich.
Another cheeky scatological intervention has seen Grow Up liberate ad spaces on tube trains and replace them with a nod to Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds, except this time the coterie of undesirables materialised under the strapline Inglørious Badturds.
Meanwhile poster art by a group calling themselves @everyonehateselon has been going up across the country. Their crowdfunded initiative is on a mission primarily concerned with “pissing off Elon Musk, one small action at a time.” Their posters of Musk, caught mid sieg heil, pithily remark “X Marks The Rot” and “Delete Your Account”. After Trump parked one of Musk’s Teslas on the White House lawn, ads mysteriously appeared in bus stop display sites declaring, “Tesla, The Swasticar Now With White Power Steering”.
Dr D, the subvertiser extraordinaire, is offering up one of his subtly blunt word plays in the form of faux newspaper headline posters that read “Tesla Tanks In Europe”. It’s a terse reminder, if Musk needed one, that so far this year the Tesla stock’s epic plunge has wiped out $650bn of the company’s market value and cost the tech oligarch $140bn. Dr D’s hand-stencilled “Dogs Dump For Trump” posters are also raising money for the Red Cross.
Finally, no less affronted by tech billionaires’ excesses, the artist and campaigning activist Frank Riot’s poster titled Profit-Driven Pricks is, however, a poo-free and altogether more poetic offering. Encountered in the wild, Riot’s plangent black text set against a golden background, invites passers-by to stop, to take stock of our precious world, to think a while. And act somehow, anyhow, to try to counter all the megalomaniacs seeking to “shamelessly carve this garden of Eden into a fiery graveyard.”
Adrian Burnham writes and lectures about art and urban culture
