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A new artwork showing Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as the twins from The Shining has been described as “brilliantly terrifying”.
The piece by street artist Bambi is called Come Play With Us.
It has appeared on the main entrance of the former Palace Hotel on West Street in Old Market, which has a famously sloping floor inside.
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The former Palace Hotel, originally the Railway Hotel, was built in 1869 to 70 and was a speculative development by Thomas Morgan designed to take advantage of a new railway station planned nearby – photo: Martin Booth
Bambi, who has more than one million followers on Instagram, said: “This one’s all about fake innocence. Power loves to act cute but it’s dangerous underneath.”
The pasted-up piece features the US president and Israeli prime minister wearing matching dresses and holding ice creams shaped like the blast from a nuclear bomb.
“A doorway should open somewhere,” said Bambi, “but this one’s sealed; just like the world their politics keeps closing off….
“When I created Come Play With Us on that sealed doorway in Bristol, I wanted the image to feel familiar – even nostalgic – before the unease sets in.
“By parodying the Grady twins from Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining, I’m tapping into a visual language everyone recognises: two figures who look innocent until you realise they’re anything but.”
“A doorway should open somewhere but this one’s sealed; just like the world their politics keeps closing off” – photo: Martin Booth
Bambi said that Trump and Netanyahu’s ice creams are “sweetness masking destruction – the way strongmen often package their politics as something harmless, even comforting”.
She added: “And the doorway they occupy? It’s deliberately boarded up.
“A doorway is supposed to offer passage, possibility, an escape route. But authoritarianism closes things down. It denies the future. It bricks over choice.
“People see political alliances; I see choreography – a performance of unity that serves control, not citizens.
“My work isn’t here to beautify surfaces; it’s here to show the cracks beneath them. Even if the doorway can’t open, the conversation still can.”
Main photo: Martin Booth
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