False Flags
5 October –  17 November 2024

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.

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