The iconoclastic graffiti artist Banksy unveils his largest project to date this weekend, when the doors of Bristol’s City Museum & Art Gallery are flung open to reveal that he has “remixed” the entire building. Renowned for infiltrating museum collections without their knowledge, Banksy has this time sought co-operation from the museum’s director and used it to install marble statues of drunken ladettes and paedophile bishops amid the columns of the three-storey Edwardian baroque building. A burnt-out ice-cream van replaces the usual information counter as a policeman in riot gear rocks perpetually on a fairground horse. The sound of chicken nuggets singing fills the vast rear hall, and a live leopardskin coat sleeps on a branch. Among the museum’s collection of old masters, an oil painting of parliament is now entirely populated by monkeys.

Elsewhere, the museum’s permanent collection has been infiltrated in more subtle ways — the vitrine holding locally produced pottery now shares space with a used hash pipe (also locally produced) and the life-size Bristol biplane suspended from the ceiling provides refuge for a Guantanamo Bay escapee.

Organised under tight security, the event has been kept secret from the museum’s entire staff and trustees, allowing the artist to work inside the venue, creating what promises to be the most exciting graffiti show held in a regional southwest museum this summer.

The exhibition is open daily, 10am-5pm, until August 31; admission free

Hi, Banksy, it’s Waldemar here. Can I call you Robin?

Let’s go on first-name terms — call me Banksy.

You only seem to make yourself available to the press when you are up to something. What are you up to now?

I’ve stuck some of my own paintings up in a museum. Only this time they’re going to let them stay up for the whole summer. I won’t be making a habit of it. Museum shows are like Center Parcs: you can do it once to get it out of your system, but you don't want to live there.

The museum is a public building, which means people who don’t normally go and look at art shows will come to mine, then not look at that, either.

Right now, the streets of Bristol are covered in more paint than just about anywhere else in the UK. The powers that be seem to have embraced graffiti. I think they’re quietly pleased I (allegedly) come from Bristol. But I think they’re even more pleased I left.

Aren’t you a bit old now to be a graffiti artist?

It seems a shame to quit just when you’re getting used to it. The police try to make out that expressing yourself on the streets is in some way juvenile, but I disagree. Otherwise, the look of your city is entirely at the mercy of hormonal teenagers or bureaucrats in city hall.

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