Artist fuses Trump, Pinocchio and Brexit in fantasy film for arts festival

IT WILL be a surreal, satirical and multi-coloured film where Brexit and Donald Trump meet the fantasy of Pinocchio.

This year’s Scottish show at the Venice Biennale visual arts festival, by Glasgow artist Rachel Maclean, will tackle “fake news” and fantasy in a half-hour film called Spite Your Face.

The artist shot the film in Glasgow, and like her previous work, it features the 29-year-old donning a variety of guises, prosthetics, make-up and assuming different voices.

It will be premièred at the 57th Biennale di Venezia in May.

As well as the politics of Brexit and Trump, the film includes the children’s story Pinocchio and the traditional masks of Venice, particularly the long-nosed masks used in times of plague.

Ms Maclean said: “I got quite interested in the narrative of Pinocchio, which is obviously an Italian tale, and linking that with ideas of post-truth politics. I was quite interested in the power of certain narratives to overwhelm truth and objective facts.

“In the European Referendum and the Trump campaign, both Ukip and Trump did a very good job of putting together narratives that people could really understand and give them something to hang on to and, no matter now many facts seemed to be thrown at them, they were somehow impenetrable.

“So I kind of address that, the space between truth and narratives, and the power of belief. I quite like the lack of truth in my work, it is a manipulation and a fabrication on so many different levels.”

The film is currently in postproduction. Like her other work, which is often hallucinatory and dream-like, it has been shot against a “green screen”. Maclean adds effects, multiple versions of herself, in various costumes and masks, and utilises actors to alter her voice. She “dresses”the set with her own artworks and manipulates its colours and scenes, as well as adding music.

Spite Your Face is in English and Italian with subtitles and will also be shown at the Talbot Rice Gallery at Edinburgh University next year.