Hannah Barry and Jeremy Deller Courtesy Louisa Buck
"Welcome to the Shitshow!". Emblazoned across the Union Jack, Jeremy Dellers inimitable comment on the state of the nation got its first airing as a centrefold for the first issue of The Art Newspapers Frieze London daily editions . It now reappears as a doormat across the threshold of Hannah Barry Gallery in Peckham, offering an aptly bleak welcome to Dellers new Brexit film which is showing there until 14 December.
Putins Happy (2019) was shot in and around Parliament Square in the first half of this year and offers a scary but also at times bleakly humorous journey into the multiple factions now gathered around Brexit. A debacle fuelled, reputedly, by Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 referendum. At last nights opening, Deller described Putins Happy as “a film about Britons not really knowing who they are”, and it certainly confirms us as a divided and often deeply weird nation.
Still from (2019) Courtesy Louisa Buck
The film kicks off with the British national anthem and Beethovens Ode to Joy (1824), played in the torrential rain by a doughty band of Remainer musicians in support of empathy, unity and free movement. But theres a rapid descent into a dark British underbelly of conspiracy theorists, rampant anti-Semites and a man who believes that Nigel Farage was sent by Christ. At a Brexit Betrayal Rally there are encounters with uniformed Protestant Unionist pipe bands from Scotland and a man covered in homemade tattoos who cites the bible'sRead More – Source
