Ben Turnbull

Theodore Roszak’s book, Flicker. An absolute humdinger of a set-up: celluloid films from the past have hidden messages planted in their original format, and what everyone has been watching as the years go by is reformatted for common consumption. Do you dare to follow the trail to find out what the original stories are meant to be telling you? Utter genius and shocking, and definitely informative for some of Q’s symbolism in the show — subliminal, innit!

Have you ever heard of how liquorice allsorts were invented? It was when the inventor made a whole batch of different types of sweet and planned to push them individually — they all fell out of the bag at the meeting, and hey presto, Bertie Bassett was born. A similar thing happened with this project.
A moment of pure chance when clearing out the studio: certain bits and bobs all fell together on the floor, and that was the original basis for the artwork, Rebirth of a Nation. True story. From that moment, the rules hadn’t just changed — they’d been completely broken. All mistakes became valuable, valid, and worth learning from.

We are all born with magic and mischief, and ever so slowly, as we grow up, the world – our jobs, our peers, our families, basically everything – sucks all that goodness out of us, and we are left empty, emotionally crippled, and basically lost. So Q was born to the sound of Ian Brown screaming, "I am the resurrection, and I am the Life." He literally clawed his way out of another human being because he had had enough and wasn’t gonna take it anymore. So we are talking about a radical change, not just in work but in life — Q is, in many ways, like the hedonistic young adult Turnbull once was: wild, untamed, and frankly doesn't care about anything as he cuts and slices his art to the beat of his own Balearic drum. BANG!

Yes, ultimately it’s an updating of the infamous Klan movie for the modern age. It’s rare, but this was the first artwork made for the show and basically began the chaos that would give birth to Q and all his power for the exhibition. The smallest work in the show, but potentially the most important. This pathway led to Nazi propaganda — dangerous ideologies, forbidden texts, banned books from Waterstones!

Complete apathy and utter ignorance of what is being witnessed – stuffing his face with popcorn and Coke – was the real key to this piece. I imagined him watching TV, bloated, changing channels but unable to take his eyes off the car crash we were all viewing that day. It’s a work I’ve discovered, even after its making, that Q is actually in. He’s the boy being led by Captain America to see the destruction and mockery of the dead — the same way innocent Q was led around the galleries in his youth by his mummy.

I absolutely love Planet of the Apes, so this was Q’s moment to bring some sci-fi into reality for the show. Let’s reimagine the end scene, but the trick here is that the statue isn’t buried—IT’S RISING OUT OF THE GROUND! A perfect metaphor for the Invisible Revolution.

We really need to talk about Timothy, right?! The Turner Diaries and other texts were critical to where Turnbull was heading (before his untimely passing in mid-2022). Q just took the knowledge and started bleeding his own ideas into that source material. This is really where Q started to press the notion of MAKING FASCISM FUN and then really began to push the envelope. Let’s imagine an entire ideology of an artist embedded with this rallying cry: “BE EXCITED, BE EXCITED.”

The pure basics of comic culture is good vs evil, so that’s a perfectly simple starting point. Q’s smartness, though, is to use the correct piece for the correct work, and sometimes that means only using one character in a piece—i.e., Liberty Once Lost Is Lost Forever. The slumped, defeated hero weeping in the corner, unable to prevent the oncoming tsunami of hate — that kind of tragic poignancy is something only Q could pull off.

It’s worth noting Turnbull’s extensive memory of films. Blow Out (1981, Brian De Palma) is another big one — an entire film based on conspiracy and shot in shades of reds, whites, and blues throughout. It bombed at the box office due to its unbelievably sad ending but has echoed throughout my career and this project with that savage satire of no one caring about what is happening right in front of their own eyes. No one wants to know about conspiracy!
The Parallax View is also on hard rotation in Q’s world and has an incredibly haunting montage scene that echoes the torture scenes of lovable Alex in A Clockwork Orange — all a massive influence on Q.

The outside activities are Q’s unicorns – rare as hen’s teeth – and you have to get up bright and early to witness them because of the rage and disgust they provoke before being torn down or defaced.

Obviously, it’s an interpretation of a future denomination of currency — a distasteful, toxic, Wacky Races version that is a precognitive take on what’s around the corner. This was Q in all his glory and marked the beginning of the MAGA trilogy (Magabuck, Magaworld, and Magasound). The bravado muscle men in the piece were actually a collection of imagery Turnbull was going to use on a Dhammer piece, but the tone of these pumped-up Adonises was perfect for Q's Brave New World.

Q is my hero, and Turnbull is protecting him from everything and everyone who can do him harm. It’s integral that his style and outright courage are not affected by the ugliness of the real world or by having to deal with all the punches that Turnbull will literally take for him — like the big brother he never had. He’s a hundred per cent pure and needs to be kept this way in order for his refreshing, unfiltered, unbiased, and uninhibited ideas to keep flowing out.

If you link Turnbull’s knowledge of film, television, music, soundtracks, and books, and then set Q up with all the raw materials, this is what you get. But you have to remember, Turnbull couldn’t take things any further (even with an encyclopaedic memory of useless information). It’s Q who filled in the one huge, gaping hole with a new style — Degenerate Pop. But knowing isn’t enough these days; we as artists have to take it up a notch — to stick our fists right up the viewer's nose, sweat blood, and lose years of our lives through stress and anxiety, all while praying for Armageddon.

We are broken; the matrix has been revealed. The humanity I see, day in, day out, will probably not give one shit about this project. We live in an age of apathy and selfishness that will result in the end of times — Q has foreseen this. There is no room now left for change; politicians are just gangsters making land deals, and that has filtered down into our own mini-microcosm societies. Do we even see each other on the street anymore? And that’s just London.

To be honest, the joy in making this series means it doesn’t matter one jot to Q how this work is received. Q’s strength is his will and courage in making the works—to feel no shame, no regret. It’s a vision born out of pure ecstasy in the way it was conceived and created. These are works that crept out of dreams, and whether they relate to reality is not a concern for Q. The viewer is invited to interpret that dream however they please – hidden meanings, pop-culture references – it’s all up for grabs if you want it. Or see it as a political standpoint; up to you.

The lesson to remember here is that serious art requires a lot of sacrifice, and you belong to it — it doesn’t belong to you. There is no control over what comes out of your own mind, let alone another mind that has decided to take charge of matters. Perhaps in the future, I’ll be careful what I wish for!