MacDonaldStrand Artists’ Talk on Sunday 10 November at 11am

MacDonaldStrand will discuss their ongoing practice and latest project, False Flags, currently on show at Gallery DODO in the Phoenix Art Space. Gallery DODO opens from 10.30 for viewing, with the talk beginning at 11.00 in the White Room on Sunday 10th November. Free coffee and apple cake will be available.

False Flags

In 2021, MacDonaldStrand began their photographic project No More Flags, inviting the public to send them media photographs of far-right marches in the UK and US that they found threatening or disturbing. In an act of ‘cathartic Photoshopping’, MacDonaldStrand crudely removed the national flags from these images, leaving empty white spaces in place of nationalist symbols, and shifting focus to the marchers’ expressions, gestures, and clothing. More recently, in early 2024, these same images were printed on 21 flags and hung from the ceiling of the Latrobe Regional Gallery in Australia.

After images of No More Flags appeared on their website, MacDonaldStrand were aggressively pursued by copyright infringement lawyers and fined thousands of pounds for appropriating the media images, forcing them to withdraw the project and delete its online documentation.

For their Photo Fringe 2024 exhibition False Flags at Gallery DODO, MacDonaldStrand re-present these printed flags in the form of triangular folds, revealing only fragments of an unrecognisable whole and alluding to the military conventions of the Ceremony of Retreat and the memorial burial flag. As a final creative act of resistance against this imposed legality, MacDonaldStrand have therefore introduced a redaction of the work in order to keep it alive.

 

MacDonaldStrand are the ongoing collaboration of Brighton-based artists Clare Strand and Gordon MacDonald. Over three decades, they have made work that responds to photographic history, politics, and practice.

 

Artists’ Talk: Sunday 10 November 2024 at 11am, White Room

MacDonaldStrand’s exhibition ‘False Flags’ continues at Gallery DODO until 17 November by appointment.

Image courtesy of Bernard G. Mills